IBMSoftware

Solution Brief

January 2013

IBMRational solution for

Collaborative Lifecycle
Management
Accelerate delivery of quality software with effective
application lifecycle management

Highlights

Helps provide access to project information with a single shared repository

Supports traditional, agile and hybrid

development methodologies with an
extensible platform

Helps steer the team in the right direction

with access to updated requirements
information
Helps promote near-continuous and
measurable process improvement with a
web-based test management portal

Today systems and applications are interconnected and complex to build,

verify and manage. Software development is more complex because
development teams are globally distributed and development platforms
are diverse. Stakeholders play a more active role than ever in decisionmaking and expect faster delivery of software. So how do you address
these issues? How do you manage software investments and foster collaboration in all aspects to be sure you get what you pay for and keep your
project on track?
The IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management
can help your organization improve virtually all aspects of the software
development lifecycle with capabilities your teams can use to integrate,
collaborate and optimize. This multiplatform solution brings together
IBMRational Requirements Composer, IBMRational Team Concert
and IBMRational Quality Manager, as a unified development platform
that can be extended with IBMRational Software Architect. This platform offers processes and capabilities that can improve your software
development teams productivity, collaboration and accelerate delivery.

Using effective Application Lifecycle

Management (ALM)
Effective Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) can help integrate
all the activities in the software development life cycle, automating
time-consuming and repeatable tasks and providing tools that promote

IBMSoftware
Solution Brief

January 2013

These capabilities can be summarized in what we call the five

imperatives for effective ALM: in-context collaboration, realtime planning, lifecycle traceability, development intelligence
and continuous improvement. The following tables list
common development challenges and how each of the five
imperatives addresses them.

real-time collaboration between globally dispersed teams,

partners and suppliers. For organizations seeking an ALM
solution for traditional, agile and hybrid project teams built
on an open and unifying IBM Jazz platform, IBM offers
the IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle
Management. This solution is designed on the Open Service
for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) specifications to make it
easier for software delivery teams to implement an effective
ALM environment. The IBM solution can help meet your
organizational needs including agile transformation and mobile
application development. If and when your needs expand,
you can add capabilities and extend the solution with other
IBM Rational tools. For example, you can connect business
strategy with lifecycle management by adding IBM Rational
Focal Point to help prioritize and execute projects and create
delivery plans that fit within resource and schedule constraints.

Achieving the five imperatives for

effective ALM
The Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management
was designed to help teams achieve the five imperatives for
effective ALM. This solution is a set of integrated products that
work together as one: Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality
Manager, Rational Requirements Composer and Rational
Software Architect. Your team can start with any one of these
offerings to address your needs: requirements management,
quality management, testing, change and configuration management or design management and expand into the other areas
based on the priorities of your organization.

Understanding the importance of the five

imperatives for effective ALM
You can automate overhead and repeatable processes such as
documentation, metrics collection, progress reporting, audit
preparation, regression testing, change propagation and more.
However, automation can only go so far with incremental gains
in productivity, mostly at the individual practitioner level. The
keys to transforming software and systems engineering are integrating the development life cycle, promoting collaboration and
steering your organization towards software innovation that
creates better financial results. IBM developers and consultants
have worked with more than 100 customers on many software
delivery transformation projects and understand that a certain
set of ALM capabilities are needed for success.

The foundation of the solution for Collaborative Lifecycle

Management is an open standards-based platform called Jazz.
The Jazz platform helps improve collaboration between traditional, hybrid and agile teams working in different countries
and organizations. This solution is designed for different
platforms such as x86, IBM Power Systems servers,
IBM System z servers and SAP and can be easier to use and
install. With the flexibility of this extensible platform, project
teams can more effectively steer through the uncertainties of
software design, development, testing, deployment and

IBMSoftware
Solution Brief

January 2013

quickly and effectively use and scale agile practices by providing

a practical path for training, coaching and tooling. The key
capabilities of the solution:

management and make better judgments. With this solution,

organizations can use their existing technology investments
even if there is a shortage of skills, because skills can be transferred across platforms.

Together, these capabilities can provide the following features

and benefits that help teams to achieve the five imperatives for
effective ALM.

In addition, with these features you can improve quality and

develop innovative software while helping reduce maintenance
costs and accelerate delivery.

Our costs are flat, even though our demand

has increased by about 30 to 35%. Were
doing more with the same amount of
resources.

Integrated tooling to help plan, build and deliver agile projects for software and systems
An adaptive process framework automates and replicates best
practices to help organizations implement agile more
consistently
Open and more flexible delivery platform that helps organizations to optimize the use of their existing commercial and
open source tools
Integrated products and best practices to extend agility and
help deliver complex and embedded systems, support large
and distributed teams and more effectively manage compliance mandates

You can further enable agile software delivery by extending

your ALM activities with test automation to help you reduce
testing bottlenecks significantly and enable faster cycle time.
With service virtualization and continuous integration testing
capabilities you can simplify testing in all application layers to
help reduce the cost and effort of testing and to help avoid lastminute integration issues. When combined with the Rational
solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management, test automation can provide the capabilities to help organizations improve
their quality management process to better manage existing
resources, overcome schedule constraints and increase team
productivity.

Frank Fabian, ANZ technology, ANZ

Supporting agile transformation

The Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management
and IBM Software Services for Rational are included in the
Rational solutions for agile transformation. The IBM solution
for agile transformation is designed to help organizations

IBMSoftware
Solution Brief

January 2013

Agile ALM for mobile development teams

In addition, the IBM solution is designed to fit the way you

already work and help extend your existing software infrastructure investments. It can provide interoperability between
heterogeneous platforms, including distributed systems,
IBM System z and IBM Power Systems to unify the delivery of
SAP and non-SAP environments while accelerating the speed
of SAP deployments and upgrades.

With more and more people using mobile devices worldwide,

you must consider the requirements of mobile application
development. In mobile application development, the focus
is shifting to strategic solutions from tactical projects. Most
development teams are still primarily concerned about writing
and testing code, though these are just two aspects of the overall mobile application development lifecycle.
ALM with agile methods can help your mobile application
development teams deliver higher quality software faster.
Customers require not only a runtime infrastructure for running mobile applications in different operating system environments, but they also require a development infrastructure to
support the development and delivery of mobile applications.

As we continue to work with IBM and

deploy effective lifecycle management
capabilities, we have accelerated our time
to market and reduced our build and
deployment time by 55%, freeing our
developers to be more creative and innovate
so we can better compete in our market.

IBM introduced the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle

Solution to help support a collaborative, mobile development
lifecycle. The Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution combines the team-oriented collaborative development solution,
Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management with
Worklight, which is a mobile application platform that enables
the development of cross-platform applications without the use
of code conversion, to provide a single mobile development
lifecycle solution for mobile application development teams.

Gabriel Lima, methodology manager, Ita BBA

You can also help reduce risks and accelerate deployment of the
IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management
with several IBM Software Services for Rational packaged service offerings (PSOs) to support an incremental usage approach
for traditional, hybrid and agile teams. The incremental usage
approach can help you establish an operational collaborative
solution more quickly. Services offerings are available for each
entry point and as your project progresses, you can add capabilities incrementally.

IBMSoftware
Solution Brief

January 2013

Real success with the Rational solution

for Collaborative Lifecycle Management
IBM clients continue to achieve both immediate value and
ongoing success as they roll out the Rational solution for
Collaborative Lifecycle Management:

IBM Rational solution for

Collaborative Lifecycle Management
extended with Design Management

PharmaPartners BV, an integrated IT solutions provider for

the primary-healthcare industry, improved collaboration
among its multisite development teams while gaining visibility into its development activities and improving traceability
between requirements and testing.1
IMS Health, a sales management and market research services provider, reduced rework by improving collaboration
throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Improved efficiency and consistency helped the company to manage
compliance better. Bottlenecks were reduced and the solution
enabled teams to focus on delivering greater value to
customers.2

Design

Requirements

Real-time
planning and
execution

Build and deploy

Quality

Software change
and configuration

Open Lifecycle Integration Platform

Figure 1. The IBMRational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management

Feature

Benefits

Open lifecycle integration platform

Helps improves the productivity of teams and quality of the work they produce, by automating workflow
and helping simplify access to team-related information

Integrated planning for agile,

traditional and hybrid teams

Helps teams to implement good development practices and helps ensure relevance

Work items

Helps improve process integrity with automated traceability throughout the development cycle

Transparency with multilevel

dashboards, reports and analytics

Helps teams to monitor, scorecard and collaborate on projects and address problems and bottlenecks

Graphical design, storyboarding

and sketching tools

Helps elicit and define business and system requirements

Code repositories

Helps provide distributed source control and improve collaboration between development teams and
third-party suppliers to share component code changes

Continuous integration throughout

builds

Helps improve quality and predictability by automating development iterations

Test management portal

Helps align development, testing and the activities of the delivery teams

Advanced capabilities for IBM Power

Systems and IBM System z

Supports teams performing COBOL, PL/I, RPG, System z, Power Systems and cross-platform
development

Common, integrated tool set

Helps multiple teams including design, development, test and deployment to collaborate on mobile application development, throughout the phases of development and components of mobile development

Sample designed to simulate real

world use

Helps you to understand how this solution supports the analyst, architect, developer or tester in your
development team.

Available in the cloud

Helps reduce capital and licensing expenses, decrease operating and labor costs and shorten test
provisioning cycle times with IBM SmartCloud

IBMSoftware
Solution Brief

January 2013

Five imperatives for effective ALM

Optimizing in-context collaboration improves product value
Your team needs to:

Find all the information related to a specific task.

Quickly grasp the who, what, when and why of team activities
Bring new team members up-to-speed quickly
Overcome the barriers of multiple time zones while working with
outsourced and distributed team members.

In-context collaboration empowers teams to:

Find, collaborate on and review software development artifacts so

they can incorporate feedback early and often.
Access information immediately in the context of their work.
Check real-time status of the teams progress with dashboards and
traceability views.
Access a single source of truth hosted in a shared repository so that
team members around the globe can collaborate effectively.

Accelerating delivery with real-time planning

Your team must:

Plan with the entire team for waterfall, iterative and agile
environments.
Manually collect and report status.
Integrate planning with execution.
Instantly see the impact of a change in project scope or
resources.

Real-time planning empowers teams to:

Refer to a single plan that spans requirements, development and test to

help the team understand the overall scope of a project.
Participate in keeping the plan current and accurate by updating plan
information with the help of a simple user interface.
Integrate planning with execution to make all the plans more visible and
accessible.
Respond to the unexpected changes in a timely manner to ensure the
team stays on schedule with the help of updated information.

Improving quality with lifecycle traceability

Your project team needs specific answers to their questions

Analyst: What defects are affecting which requirements?

Project Manager: Are we ready to release the software?
Developer: What test uncovered this defect, on which
environment and what from what build?
Release Engineer: How can I standardize when teams use
different tools?
Quality Professional: What is ready for me to test?

Lifecycle traceability empowers teams to:

Establish relationships between software artifacts.

Identify and close artifact gaps, ensuring coverage throughout disciplines.
Determine the completeness of planned items by inspecting all
related artifacts.
Easy access to related artifacts and provides a single view.
Have the transparency to view the original requirements and make
fully-informed decisions based on business priorities.

Improving predictability with development intelligence

Your team needs to:

Provide one view of project status at multiple levels.

Make better decisions based on facts rather than guesses or
estimates.
Track desired improvements with metrics.
Minimize administrative overhead by relying on your environment
to capture metrics.

Development intelligence empowers teams to:

Use one view to understand the project status with the help of dashboards.
View all the facts, communicate status, monitor progress, diagnose
problems, and identify corrective actions with details from a dashboard.
Steer projects and programs to deliver on time.
Apply business intelligence techniques to software and systems development.
View trends to help improve predictability.

Reducing costs with continuous improvement

Your team needs to:

Optimize templates that support traditional and agile workflows.

Change processes dynamically as part of a continuous
feedback loop.
Allow team leads to determine how strict or lax the rules
should be.
Modify process enforcement over the life of a project, to
encourage early-stage experimentation and end-game stability.

Continuous improvement empowers teams to:

Improve software delivery through automation by reducing manual,

non-creative and error prone tasks.
Promote incremental improvement of a project when needed.
Achieve breakthrough improvements by capturing best practices and
reusing the best practices across teams.
Encourage everyone to participate by providing access to a single tool
that everyone can share regardless of their platform.
6

IBMSoftware
Solution Brief

January 2013

Conclusion

IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management

is an integrated ALM solution based on the open and unifying
Jazz platform. The solution can help your organization
coordinate software development activities, including mobile
application development, from business needs to system delivery. Rational developers have extensive experience working
on software delivery transformation projects; they understand
that certain capabilities, or imperatives, are needed for success.
As stated earlier, the five imperatives that are the keys to
consistently delivering better quality applications on-time are:
in-context collaboration, real-time planning, lifecycle traceability, development intelligence and continuous improvement.

You can start with any of the offerings that are part of the
solution: Rational Requirements Composer, Rational Team
Concert, Rational Quality Manager and extended with
Rational Software Architect. Together they provide a unified
development platform that helps provide processes and capabilities that can accelerate multiplatform software delivery by
helping improve your software development teams productivity.
The IBM solution can help you gain a competitive edge by
helping improve collaboration, automate processes and offer a
single source of truth with viewpoints for virtually all the members involved in the project.

To help accelerate the deployment of the solution for

Collaborative Lifecycle Management and meet your specific
needs, you can consider the following:

For SAP customers, the Rational SAP Connector provides

the ability to integrate key areas of IBM Rational software
with SAPs application lifecycle management solution.
IBM Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters extends the
Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management
with integrations to third party and open source tools.

For customers interested in ALM solutions on the cloud,

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)
and IBM SmartCloud Application Services (Platform-as-aService) include the Rational solution for Collaborative
Lifecycle Management
Several Software Services for Rational packaged service offerings (PSOs) to support an incremental adoption approach for
traditional, hybrid and agile teams.

Why IBM?
IBMRational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management
offers a scalable and extensible team collaboration platform that
is built on Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC)
specifications to simplify data linking and tool integration
throughout the project lifecycle. The IBMsolution helps combine requirements, build and deploy and quality management
in a way that makes effective application lifecycle management
easier, and supports agile, traditional and hybrid development
methodologies.

For more information

To learn more about IBMRational solution for Collaborative
Lifecycle Management, contact your IBMmarketing
representative or IBMBusiness Partner, or visit the following
websites: ibm.com/software/rational/announce/lifecycle/ and
jazz.net/projects/clm

To learn more about connecting business strategy with

Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management,
visit the following website: ibm.com/software/products/us/en/
subcategory/SW44A

To know more about mobile Application development with

Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management,
visit the following website: ibm.com/software/rational/mobile/
To learn more about Rational solutions for SAP, visit the
following website: ibm.com/software/rational/solutions/sap/
To know more about IBMSmartCloud Enterprise for Rational
Collaborative Lifecycle Management visit the following
website: ibm.com/software/rational/info/cloud-services/
Additionally, IBMGlobal Financing can help you acquire
the software capabilities that your business needs in the most
cost-effective and strategic way possible. Well partner with
credit-qualified clients to customize a financing solution to
suit your business and development goals, enable effective
cash management, and improve your total cost of ownership.
Fund your critical IT investment and propel your business forward with IBMGlobal Financing. For more information, visit:
ibm.com/financing

Copyright IBM Corporation 2013

IBM Corporation
Software Group
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Produced in the United States of America
January 2013
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International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions
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Worklight is a trademark or registered trademark of Worklight,

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This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be
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country in which IBM operates.
The client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only.
Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations
and operating conditions.
It is the users responsibility to evaluate and verify the operation of any
other products or programs with IBM products and programs.
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED
AS IS WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES
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NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the
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that its services or products will ensure that the client is in compliance with
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1 PharmaPartners

improves collaboration, gains development activity insight,

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