The Process Practice

The new version 7.5 of Rational Method Composer is available today. Despite its version number this is a major new release of this modeling environment and framework. The most important addition is all new content referred to as IBM Practices, as well as tool features around practices that allow you to create and manage your own agile mashups. Find in there core agile practices that you know from literature and allow you to assemble processes that combine the best of approaches such as Scrum, XP, OpenUP. In addition, we provide practices that allow you to scale up your agile development projects based on IBM’s own experience in doing agile development work in very large globally distributed development projects. Every practice also provides guidance for implementing it into your organization as well as and metrics to use to self-assess how successfully you adopt each practice. See the image below for lists of the most important practices available for scaling agile development.

New IBM Practices available in RMC 7.5

Use the new RMC process builder perspective to intuitively browse and select these practices using a simple shopping cart paradigm to assemble and publish a Web site to get you started. Then evolve these practices using RMC to make them your practices that reflect your way of working or add your own.

In addition to the support for practices we provide many new other capabilities and enhancements addressing many customer requests such as command line publishing, spell checking, a graphical image map editor, tagging, query-based categories, an integration with Rational Asset Manager, and many more. Check out the official annonucement document for more details on the new features. Also watch this space for additional collateral that we are providing on DeveloperWorks and ibm.com around IBM Practices and RMC in the coming days and weeks.

We just released an incubator (an experimental unsupported solution for feedback that you can use at your own risk) for Rational Method Composer and Rational Team Concert users on jazz.net. This incubator provides experimental code that allows generating a Jazz process template based on a process modeled and documented with Rational Method Composer, which is then uploaded along with the published process documentation to the Jazz Team Server. There the process template can be used for creating a project and the published content will be directly available for team members using Rational Team Concert.

Read this tutorial to learn all about it, including where to download and how to set it up: “How to document your team’s processes for IBM Rational Team Concert using IBM Rational Method Composer“.

[Update 10/22: New URL for the tutorial.]

After almost three years since our initial specification submission to the OMG I am proud to announce that the formal Software and Systems Process Engineering Meta-Model 2.0 specification is now officially available on the OMG Web server. Please, go and get it here: http://www.omg.org/spec/SPEM/2.0/.

We released iFix3 for IBM Rational Method Composer 7.2 on Friday. We recommend that all 7.2 users apply this upgrade as it fixes a couple of bugs and even provides some enhancements to existing features that people were urgently asking for. See a summary of the key changes below. As always download and install it by just starting your IBM Installation Manager from your Start menu, clicking the Update button and following the wizard for downloading and installing the patch. After the patch is applied checkout the release notes in the installation directory: “<install_dir>\rmc\readme\readme_ifix3.html“.

The most import changes/fixes:

• Added missing online help sections around Workspace libraries and Birt report design.
• The configuration editor now does not perform a consistency check (that would result in info, warning, and error messages in the Problem view) every time you make a change, which was really degrading performance. Now the check is performed only when you save or press the “show configuration errors” button on the top-right of the editor.
• Several additions to the way copying of process resolves variability relationships on activities as well as the underlying method content. For example, if you perform a deep-copy of a pattern or activity to another process that it also performs an automatic synchronize to pick-up contributors or replacers valid in the target process’ configuration. In particular in the Tailoring perspective you can select a process that has several valid configurations with any of these and get all contributions/replacements that are valid in that configuration. Before this release you could only work with the process’ default configuration.
• The tailoring perspective now supports adding attachments to method elements that show with the respective process elements.  A wizard walks you selecting the attachment and then performs some magic under the covers of creating a contributor and synchronizing the process without the user having to do anything.
• Several fixes around using international characters and fonts in names. Despite those fixes, make sure that when you deploy RMC Web sites that use international characters such as umlauts in the names to configure your web servers to support the respective character sets used.
• Improved loading times of the published Web site, in particular when loading the first page.
• Fixed the issue that the rich text editor’s cursor and scroll area would jump to the top of the text every time you would save, indent text, or drag elements into the editor to create links.
• Fixed miscellaneous bugs around Search in RMC, roll-ups in the published site, contributing attachments, broken report templates introduced in ifix2, missing roles imported from WBM, and many more.

I just started a new page on this blog that lists some resources that I find useful and worth sharing. This is intended to be a growing list as I just started adding the most obvious references. Check the ‘last update’ date to keep track when additions have happened.

Click on the tab above or if you read this via a feed go here: http://blog.haumer.net/resources.

The iFix2 patch for Rational Method Composer 7.2 will be released on the update server in the next couple of hours. To download and install it just start IBM Installation Manager from your Start menu, click the Update button and follow the wizard for downloading and installing the patch.

This patch includes some important fixes and minor enhancements so that we generally want to encourage all RMC users to install it. Most important changes:

• Added the ability to select a base configuration when creating a Tailoring Session. This allows you now, for example, to start your tailoring session not only based on the default RUP configuration, but any configuration that includes the RUP processes. Hence, you can now start with the Small RUP for RAD and tailor it to your needs.
• The tailoring wizard will not ask your for a configuration project anymore, but just automatically create/use one specific project for tailoring sessions.
• Added the ability to extend activities from the same process, i.e. applying the same activity more than once in a process.
• Fixed migration and import bug reported here.
• Fixed publishing issues with Activity and Activity Detail diagrams as well as when using activity partitions.
• Fixed the ability to run a report against the whole method library, i.e. without selecting a configuration.
• Fixed issues in which the editors became dirty by just opening an element (such as Steps).
• Fixed the missing links from Guidance pages back to the referencing Activities.
• Resolved some localization issues in Reporting.

Also make sure to check-out the readme file for some remaining open issues.

Using IBM’s new installer technology with RMC gives us the capability to roll-out bug fixes much, much quicker now to our customers. Our team has just released the first of these so-called iFixes via the IBM Installation Manager to fix a problem RMC 7.2 had with its Microsoft Project export.

If you are still using MS Project with RMC (and not the advanced integration with Rational Portfolio Manager ) then get this fix by just starting the Installation Manager and clicking on the “Update Packages” button. It will then guide you through downloading and installing the fix.

Good news. Last Thursday the OMG’s Architecture Board accepted our Finalization Report for the OMG Software and Systems Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM 2.0). In other words the specification work is done and the documents are official! All we still have left to do is to create a pretty looking document without change bars and publish that. In the meantime you can use the documents listed below.

I cannot express how happy I am that after almost three years of work this specification is finally ready. I would like to thank every contributor and supporter for their hard work and support. See the (hopefully) complete list of names in the spec itself. I learned so much during this process, including some quite sad facts of life such as ‘being a good politician is more important than being a good engineer’.

IBM Rational Method Composer version 7.2 was finally released today. Go here to see the official announcement at the IBM website. Key themes for this release were

• to provide more presentation options for processes by integrating RMC with the Eclipse BIRT reporting technology that allows publishing in any user-defined format and layout supporting amongst others compliance scenarios such as a simple ‘print the process for our auditor’
• to increase the scalability of RMC in respect to distributed team support by providing workspaces that manage method plugins from many different sources and physical locations
• to provide a simpler UI for project managers to tailor a process for projects
• to provide new and improved integrations with process formalization and enactment environments such as IBM Rational Portfolio Manager and Websphere Business Modeler.

This is the biggest update for RMC since its initial release. We are adding these key new capabilities to RMC, which clearly distinguish it from the open source EPF Composer 1.2 (which was released last month and updated with a bug fix release 1.2.0.1 two weeks ago). I really like to thank all of my colleagues at IBM for their dedicated and passionate work to get this excellent release done and out in time.

Here a more detailed summary of all the numerous new features and key improvements (not a complete list):

• Custom Publication and user-definable Reports with Eclipse BIRT
  • Publishing to document; alternative output formats include MS Word, PDF, and HTML
  • Create any kind of report on any information in an RMC method library
  • Powerful BIRT visual report designer (well documented, tutorials, and books available)
  • Easy to use for out-of-the-box with predefined report building blocks for RMC
    (33 report templates and 2 report libraries with altogether 43 data sets and 30 predefined tables)
• Simplified Tailoring perspective for Project Managers
  • Specialized perspective in RMC for Project Managers hides many process modeling complexities
  • Provides simple and essential WBS-oriented analysis and editing operations
• New modern and user-friendly look-and-feel for published Web sites
  • Newly designed modern and accessible UI for browsing
  • Pure Java Script implementation (DoJo); no more applets & frames required
    (backwards compatibility to 7.1.1 format still supported)
  • Deploy directly as WAR files to your JEE server
  • Alternative Search Engine support for web servers
  • Layout and style customization framework (skins)
  • Easy bookmarks and URL interchange
  • All pages show breadcrumbs
  • Show categorizations in content pages
  • Publish where roles, tasks, and work products are used in processes
  • Show tasks in Process breakdown in navigation tree
• Distributed and organized Method Library Workspaces
  • Hierarchical and scalable organization of your method plugins
  • Method plugins in a library workspace can be distributed in many physical locations using many different source control systems
• New diagram editor
  • Complete user-friendly reimplementation of diagram editors (Eclipse GMF)
  • Adds swimlanes, control flow labels, as well as free-form drawing and styles
  • Ability to save in gif, jpg, bmp, and other formats.
• Improved integration with IBM® Rational® Portfolio Manager
  • Better support for iterative development: Merging RMC process changes into existing RPM project templates
  • Better support for governance:
    • Export of work product templates to project templates
    • Export of all role relationships to RPM: Primary, additional, and assisting roles
    • Export of RMC estimates to RPM project templates
  • Better scalability and bug fixes:
    • Every template can have its own base URL for published content
    • Import of predecessor dependencies / control flow into RPM
• New Integration with IBM® Websphere® Business Modeler
  • Export Method Content and Processes to Websphere Business Modeler
  • Import Websphere Business Modeler business models into Rational Method Composer
• Miscellaneous improvements
  • New ‘Extends and Replaces’ variability type
  • Element ordering in categories: order alphabetical, by type, or manually
  • Rich Text Editor improvements: Change font & size, paste plain text, paste from Word, add link/image in HTML view, HTML error markers and correction
  • Improvements for Configuration editor:
    • Fine-granular configuration of process by adding or removing categorized elements (e.g., add all elements categorized as CMMI Level 2)
    • Redesigned error and problem reporting UI for Method Configurations and Method Libraries
    • Highlight current view in configuration editor
    • Order configuration views
  • Process Editor Improvements
    • Activity indent/outdent
    • Suppress all tasks at any level
    • Allow multiple descriptors in same activity
    • Additional SCM support: Subversion
    • New platform support: Vista, IE7, Mozilla/FireFox 2, Eclipse 3.3