IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials

Improve your team productivity with Integrated Process, Planning, and Collaboration using Team Concert Enterprise Edition

• Understand the core features and techniques of Rational Team Concert and Jazz platform through a real-world Book Manager Application
• Expand your knowledge of software development challenges and find out how Rational Team Concert solves your tech, team, and collaboration worries
• Complete overview and understanding of the Jazz Platform, Rational Team Concert, and other products built on the Jazz Platform
• Explore out-of-the-box projects with the 'Sandbox' feature of the Jazz Platform, even before you install Rational Team Concert
• A practical guide by a Rational Team Concert expert, with a simple, step-by-step approach to solve your team management and collaboration worries

In Detail

Software development is a collaborative effort needing active and timely input and response from all its members. Every day, project managers face ever-increasing pressures to produce high-quality software with increasing constraints. With IBM's Rational Team Concert collaborative software delivery environment, you can tremendously improve the productivity of your entire team through a web-based user-interface, continuous builds, a customizable process with work support, team support, integration and many more features.

Written by Suresh Krishna and TC Fenstermaker, experts on Rational Team Concert, this book will help you leverage the full potential of the IBM Rational Team Concert platform to improve your individual and team performance. It follows a realistic case-study example enabling you to learn about Rational Team Concert fundamentals and best practices along the way to efficiently manage your software projects and tackle various software development challenges.

Beginning with an in-depth analysis of software development challenges, the book goes on to introduce the Jazz Platform followed by a complete overview of the architecture of Rational Team Concert. After you install Rational Team Concert on WebSphere and learn to configure the server and clients, you will see all the features in relation to Web and Eclipse clients.

From Chapter 3 onwards a realistic sample application is constructed to give you a strong grasp of your concepts. As you proceed, you learn source control, the mechanism to create, control, and manage documents, artifacts in a software development lifecycle, followed by different tools that Rational Team Concert offers for effective team and work management. You tackle the various challenges of Team Collaboration by integrated e-mail, instant messaging, events, feeds, and work items, the basic units of the task. You also learn the various aspects of the software development process and release planning along with process templates, which provide the initial process and iteration of your project. Finally, you extend the Rational Team Concert and make use of the Jazz Platform APIs to customize your process to fit your organizational needs.

A comprehensive and practical guide to get acquainted with Rational Team Concert and Jazz Platform, boosting your individual and team productivity

What you will learn from this book

• Learn to set up the Rational Team Concert Team Server and Client and configure it for WebSphere
• Using source control, learn effective creation, handling, and ownership of documents, source files, and artifacts at different phases of the software development process
• Using various tools for collaboration, learn how to collaborate effectively and exchange the information required in a timely fashion
• Practice application development with the scrum methodology, which emphasizes continuous assessment of completed work
• Create, manage, and schedule work within the team using different user interface views and queries
• Maximize your team productivity with proper management of work schedules using work items, dashboards, reports, and process messages, all of which give a complete insight into the project status
• Go through the complete software development process and release planning, defining, configuring, and tracking the project release with process templates, team roles, iterations, sprints, and tracking releases
• Practice continuous integration by learning how to define and configure Build Engine definitions, which allow for scheduling, monitoring, and tracing the builds with source control and work items

Approach

With their straightforward style, Suresh Krishna and TC Fenstermaker have put their years of experience and motivation into this practical guide that assists in finding an integrated approach to increased team productivity. The numerous tips, notes, and suggestions strengthen your grasp of fundamentals and the foundation upon which you are ready to build your customized Rational Team Concert application. Ample screenshots make sure that you get the configurations correct the first time. A real-world Book Manager Application walks you through all the core features of the Rational Team Concert during different phases of development and release.

Who this book is written for

If you are a Project Manager or a Team Member, who would like to find an integrated approach to deal with modern software development challenges, you should read this book. Or if you are someone who likes to stay one step ahead in team management, you have got the right choice here.OA