The Process Practice

The experimental incubator that allows you to generate process templates for Rational Team Concerts that I had announced here for RMC 7.2 and RTC 1.0 has now been updated to support Team Concert version 1.0.1 and Method Composer 7.5ifix1. Go here on jazz.net to download the updated bits. I also updated the tutorial here on IBM’s DeveloperWorks that describes the integration. One important enhancement to this new version of the integration is the ability to provide as many default templates as you want now (see Advanced Usage sections in the tutorial for how to create and manage these).

The “Method Authoring Method” is a collection of practices, method content, and processes created with Rational Method Composer that describe how to develop all of these things with RMC. In other words and as a the name says it already: it provides methods for doing methods. This collection of practices covers topic areas that range from ways of eliciting and sketching methods, over how to use RMC to model processes, to a reference process model architecture for managing interchangeable sets of practices and process on a very large scale.

We now offer different packages and pre-published configurations of this content for different audiences:

1. First of all there is an open source version of this content on the Eclipse Process Framework homepage that focuses on the scope of the open source practices of the Eclipse Process Framework.  Download it here and preview it here on EPF Wiki.
2. Then there are two extended versions of this content focusing on the additional capabilities of Rational Method Composer and the way IBM’s commercial practices content is organized. They require an IBM Rational Method Composer license and can be downloaded from IBM’s DeveloperWorks here.

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.]

This week I had the honor of presenting our work around SPEM 2, Eclipse Process Framework, and Rational Method Composer at the SEE 2008 Conference (Software and Systems Engineering Essential) in Bern. If you are interested to see what this was all about then go here for the abstract and here for the presentation slides.

“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.

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.

This week the OMG SPEM Finalization Task Force finished its work and we produced an updated version of the SPEM 2.0 specification that incorporates fixes for all reported issues. Go here to download the latest specification document from the OMG server. If you are interested in the models then you can get the meta-model files here (in CMOF and Rational Software Modeler 7 format) and the UML 2 Profile here (in XMI and IBM Rational Software Modeler 7 format).

If you are interested in the issues that were addressed in the final adopted specification (get the old adopted spec here) you can download and review the FTF’s report which we are going to present at the upcoming OMG meeting in Jacksonville end of September.

This should be the final activity to finalize SPEM 2.0 and it should then be ready for publication as a formal OMG specification.

We will be releasing IBM Rational Method Composer version 7.2 very soon. Our incredibly productive development team is hard at work fixing the last few bugs and preparing the release for end of September. This will be the biggest update for this product since its first release. It will support many new capabilities such as Reporting using the Eclipse Birt report designer and engine, a new Process Tailoring perspective for project managers, improved and new integrations with IBM Rational Portfolio Manager and IBM Webshpere Business Modeler as well as many new scalability and usability improvements.

I will use this blog to talk a little bit more about the new capabilities in the next few weeks leading up to the launch. In the meantime, you could check-out the overview presentation to RMC 7.2 that I gave at Rational Software Development Conference (RSDC 07) in June. See the abstract here and download the slides from here.

The slides are inside a 50MB zip file which includes in addition to the PDF file a directory of Flash recordings demo’ing the new feature. To view these recordings just drag them into a web browser. You need to have the Flash Player installed on your machine.