Resources for Business Analysts

I was in Orlando for the Rational Software Development Conference June 1-4. This is a great place for me to connect with old friends and to find out what direction IBM is taking Rational.

The focus this year was on teams - to be successful we have to collaborate globally.

The big new thing is the Jazz platform. This is what ties the various Rational products together. They have been developing Jazz for about 3 years, but this year announced a variety of products that integrate with Jazz.

In the area of team collaboration, IBM is releasing Team Concert on the Jazz platform. This product is currently in beta, but will be available about the end of June. This product lets you define people, teams, roles, and processes. One thing I thought was very cool was that a team can select a process, such as SCRUM or RUP, and customize it in the tool. Then the team selects which people will play which roles. When you do your work, the tool prompts you what to do based on your role and the process that your team is following. There are other features as well, such as something that looks like an instant messenger capability. I have not played with it much yet, but this is the product to enable communication between team members.

Go to jazz.net and register for a free account to get access to the beta. My understanding is that IBM is going to allow anyone to get 3 licenses free, so if you have a small team, this might be an interesting tool for you to try to help your team share information and artifacts.

Another product that interests me on the Jazz platform is Requirements Composer. As you might imagine, this got my attention! Requirements Composer is something you use during requirements elicitation. There is a rich text editor and a storyboarding tool. You can import files of many types. You can collect a lot of information in a group, then label some part (maybe a name) as a requirement that you manage in Requisite Pro. It uses the features of Team Concert and Jazz to enable collaboration.

This tool will be available for beta about the end of June, at the jazz.net site. Requirements Composer will integrate with Ravenflow, iRise, and RequsitePro.

ClearCase and ClearQuest also plug into the Jazz platform, so it is possible for you to access those tools from the other tools that plug into Jazz.

I know this kind of integrated platform has been tried before. This is looking pretty interesting though. I’m excited by the use of open source and web technologies to construct these products, and that the developers come from the open source community so they understand distributed collaborative development.

I’m keeping an eye on developments this year and plan to spend time with the various beta releases, trying out the products and providing feedback to IBM. I encourage you to do the same.

Geri