The Process Practice

IBM’s DeveloperWorks now features a landing page that introduces IBM’s Development Practices at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/practices/.

This page provides an overview  to practices and links to one page summaries for 14 practices with links to resources and references. Needless to say that all of these practices are available as fully modeled, documented, and reusable practices in IBM Rational Method Composer 7.5, which currently ships with altogether 21 practices. You can use Method Composer to assemble and publish the right set of practices that you would like to implement as well as use the tool to customize and extend each practice to represent your exact way of working.

If you are an experienced RMC user and want to see a quick overview to what is new and noteworthy in Rational Method Composer 7.5 then check out this new page. If you are new to RMC make sure to also review some of the overview material listed on the Resources page. Check back here for more upcoming collateral for RMC 7.5 and Practices.

There is a great new paper on Developer Works by my colleague Cécile Péraire that reports on how a group in IBM’s Global Business Services uses RMC to model process for CRM with localized differences. The paper shows a great case study for using variability and method configurations as well as gives recommendation for creating a content architecture and design patterns for solving problems such as variants and optimizing reuse.

Cécile Péraire, "Architecting IBM Global and Local Business Processes using Rational Method Composer", Rational Edge, Summer 2008.

If you are using any of the products listed below you can use the packaged Process Browser to browse your own RMC published content with in these environments. Even better the Process Advisor view that is part of these products can react to specific UI events and propose context-specific content recommendations. For example, if you select a Use Case in a Use-Case Diagram in RSA, Advisor will display work products, tasks, guidelines, tool mentors, checklist etc. relevant to use cases. Find here two articles that provide more background how to use, customize, and even extend this capability:

• Overview article
• How to bundle advisor content

Here the list of products that contain this feature:

Software development

• IBM® Rational® Software Architect
• IBM® Rational® Application Developer
• IBM® Rational® Software Modeler
• IBM® Rational® Systems Developer

Software testing

• IBM® Rational® Performance Tester
• IBM® Rational® Functional Tester
• IBM® Rational® Manual Tester
• IBM® Rational® Funtional Tester Extension

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/.

“Skins” is a new capability in RMC 7.2 that allows you to modify the look-and-feel of the published Web site to your requirements. It has been added to the 7.2 release as a response to RMC user’s requests for being able to make specific changes to the presentation of processes in html. Some user wanted to change the order in which information is presented on the various pages, others wanted to omit some of the presented information all together, many wanted to change the styles such as fonts and colors to match their company’s guidelines, or others even wanted to use a different terminology in places (e.g. call an ‘activity’ a ‘procedure’ instead). All of these changes can be made to the published site using Skins.

The following tutorial called “Customizing Publication Skins in IBM Rational Method Composer 7.2” will teach you how the most common scenarios for creating your own custom skins that reflect your company’s Web style guide or just your own personal taste.

Are you modeling formal business processes using Websphere Business Modeler? Do you need to provide a comprehensive human readable documentation of these processes, for example want to publish an operational manual that document your processes with natural language text?

If yes then check out this new white paper called “Achieving consistency between business process models and operational guides – How Rational and WebSphere software enable enterprise documentation in SOA environment” written by my colleagues Greg Rader and Chinh Vo that describes how to use the new integration between Rational Method Composer and Websphere Business Modeler to do exactly that.

Happy new year everyone! Our team is hard at work creating additional collateral and guidance for some of the new RMC 7.2 features. First up are the missing online pages for the new Workspaces capability. This feature is intended for advanced users that want to scale up their method development effort with their team(s). It allows you to distribute a method library to many filesystem directories throughout your network infrastructure, which so far had to be maintained in exactly one directory. In this workspace mode a method library is able to reference method plug-ins and method configurations that even exist in other libraries without importing or exporting. This allows you to easily share method plug-ins across teams, manage your plug-in in multiple ClearCase VOBs, or even mix and match plug-ins maintained in different source control system.

Download some overview slides here: Overview to RMC Workspaces. The first slide shows you a typical customer situation in which workspaces make a big difference. You see that several teams manage their own method libraries, but that some method plug-ins are used by more than one team. What normally happens is that one team owns and maintains the content of a plug-in and that many other teams reuse these plug-ins in their library. Before RMC 7.2 is was required that users export these plug-ins, zip them up, send them to their partners, those would import them into their local library. Now, all you do is maintain all your plug-ins in a source control system and the other teams can pick and choose plug-ins from that server (instead of loading an entire library as it was required by 7.1.x). The way this has been realized is by utilizing the Eclipse workspace capability and the option to now make every method plug-in an Eclipse project; instead of managing the whole method library as one Eclipse project in 7.1.x. The old way is still supported by RMC 7.2 and in fact is the default usage model, hence nothing will change if you are not interested in using the new feature. Everything can stay the same. However, if the attached help pages show you how you can convert your existing library into such a new workspace library and use that.

An example for using the feature you see on Slide 2. It shows a Library view of RMC in Workspace mode that uses method plug-ins that are physically stored in different locations: the my.test one is stored in my local workspace directory. Here I can experiment and author locally without the need to share the files with other by checking them in. The second and third plug-ins with the yellow harddisk symbol overlay icons indicate that these method plug-ins are managed in CVS. These are actually coming directly from the EPF Server on eclipse.org. The fourth one with the blue frame is managed on a ClearCase here in my office and stored in my local ClearCase view directory. The same is true for the configurations: the first one is in CVS the second in ClearCase.

To learn how to use this feature download the online help pages in PDF format here: How to use the RMC 7.2 Workspace feature. We will add them to the tool’s online help with the next iFix.

Other material that you should see surfacing on developerWorks soon are tutorials and overview papers on how to use BIRT Reporting with RMC, Skins, and the Tailoring Perspective. Stay tuned.

The SPEM 2.0 Beta 2 specification is now available on the OMG server here:

http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ptc/07-11-01

This is almost the final specification before the final approvals by the OMG’s business committee and vote of the board of directors in December. However, content wise this is it. The document’s title page contains urls to all the related xml documents as well.

The OMG just released a report about an interdisciplinary case study of OMG and Open Group members to evaluate modeling the TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) ADM (Architecture Development Method) with OMG meta-models, in particular SPEM. It provides some good insights and examples for how SPEM can be utilized as a representation framework for systematically formalizing an informally described method. This report uses SPEM 1.1, but provides pointers to SPEM 2.0. One of the authors of this report actually has started a new project in which he captures parts of these models (and also more importantly the textual content) using EPF Composer, which you can find here.