IBM has announced its vision for community driven development and introduced new software to help clients drive greater visibility, business intelligence and collaboration in software delivery projects. The roadmap, unveiled at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007 held in Bangalore , centers around IBM's software development portfolio which helps geographically and/or organizationally distributed development teams collaborate in real time.
Historically, software development and delivery has been a closed process limited to in-house skills and software development tools that have focused on making individual developers more productive. Today, software development is becoming more complex with the actual development happening with offshore teams and/or business partners in different locations. Managing projects that span geographic and organizational boundaries is emerging as one of the top software delivery challenges. Enabling greater team agility and alignment with evolving business requirements also compounds the challenge. IBM is helping clients gain intelligence from their software assets and increase global project efficiency and insight, through its open transparent approach to community development.
IBM is announcing new offerings to help geographically distributed development teams collaborate, lower the total cost of global software delivery, and deliver software to market faster than ever before. The new Web-centric, lower bandwidth software helps customers reduce overhead costs of deploying a client technology, and allows outsourced members of development teams to participate in software delivery projects more easily.
• IBM Rational Team Concert, beta 1 -- the first offering developed on the Jazz technology platform, IBM Rational Team Concert is a collaborative portal designed to improve team productivity by enabling real-time collaboration across a software delivery team. The new software is optimized for Agile development teams in mid- and large-sized businesses and can extend IBM Rational's leading change and release management solutions Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest. In the future, IBM expects to deliver a family of IBM Rational Team Concert offerings, and extensions to existing IBM products, that enrich the collaborative nature of the IBM Rational Software Delivery platform.
• IBM Rational Asset Manager 7.0 -- generally available on June 29, 2007, this new software provides visible intelligence into software assets and how they are consumed in a collaborative environment. IBM Rational Asset Manager is a registry of design, development and deployment related assets, such as codes, patterns and tests, and allows organizations to reduce development cost and time; securely communicate across disparate global teams and eliminate rework with asset-traceability and utilization monitoring; and accelerate service delivery.
• IBM Rational ClearCase 7.01 -- the latest version helps improve developer productivity and security. By managing and controlling the assets needed when developing software, Rational ClearCase helps clients isolate data based on the location of a user. For example, in some countries there are export control regulations which prevent users from working on certain aspects of code. Clients who may have both an in-house development team and outsourced the development of specific software deliverables, can now isolate data in a secure way to ensure that remote teams only have access to the assets they need. IBM Rational ClearCase 7.01 helps clients with global projects monitor these critical situations.
• IBM Rational Portfolio Manager 7.1 -- the recently announced project and portfolio management offering has a new Ajax-based Web interface that allows team members to manage their work, submit time and expense reports.
With more than 22,000 software developers in 61 locations around the globe, IBM knows first hand that global development is hard. Utilizing shared best practices is critical to delivering a project on schedule. The development teams from the IBM Lab in Bangalore , India , and the IBM Lab in Lexington , MA , have captured their collective experiences and published a Redbook titled "Global Development and Delivery - based on the experiences of the Rational India Lab." This Redbook discusses common challenges in geographically distributed development environments and the steps IBM took to tailor IBM Rational tools to solve these problems through case study examples. IBM has also created a plug-in offering focused on geographically distributed development for IBM Rational Method Composer 7.2, a process for helping developers deliver customized yet consistent software development projects. Today, IBM Rational Method Composer is used by more than 1,300 organizations worldwide.
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