Lifecycle resources like change requests, test cases, defects, requirements, and builds become even more useful, if they are tightly integrated. IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) integrates these lifecycle resources and provides a collaborative lifecycle management solution with Change Management, Source Control Management and Build Management components in a single, integrated product supporting all popular platforms.
RTC is built on the IBM Rational Jazz platform and can seamlessly integrate with other Jazz-based products like Rational Quality Manager (RQM) and Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) to connect the work of Analysts with Development and Testing teams.
However, the Software Development industry is replete with disparate ALM tools that do not support Jazz/OSLC, but are used ubiquitously and have eventually become the ‘best-of-breed’ tools. Integrating such tools with RTC is a challenge, and Kovair addresses this challenge with ‘Kovair RTC Integration adapter’.
Features & Benefits
- Streamlines development processes with integrated Change Management and Configuration Management capabilities.
- Improves work quality and enhances team productivity through workspace management & parallel development support.
- Provides consolidated corporate level visibility of real data spanning across several tool and functional boundaries, thereby reducing the administrative overhead.
- Enables system-defined Work Items, such as defects, tasks, and stories as well as custom Work Items in RTC to flow bi-directionally between RTC and other integrated ALM tools.
- Preserves data integrity of Work Items across all the integrated tools.
- Keeps all stakeholders in sync with the latest changes and ensures smooth change propagation through lifecycle silos.
- Provides traceability across requirements, test cases, defects, and tasks.
- Ability to integrate RTC with ALM tools irrespective of their vendors and supported platforms
- Readily scalable integration environment
- Full data flow across tools instead of just federated links
- Two-way synchronization of RTC Work Items with other tools
- Ability to create custom Work Items and custom fields in RTC and replicate them in other tools
- Work-item tracking throughout the development lifecycle
- Ability to establish relations between objects of disparate ALM tools
- Thin adapter – Drag & Drop configuration of business rules and an ability to create multi-project templates
- Conflict detection and mediation
- Web interface for end-to-end traceability, consolidated reporting, and dashboard
Kovair Support for RTC Integration
Kovair RTC Integration Adapter leverages the Omnibus architecture to enable collaboration among the stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle and ensures synchronization of RTC Work Items with that of disparate ALM tools.
Unlike other integration offerings, the integration of RTC with other ALM tools is not a point-to-point integration. Instead, it is based on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture that requires only one adapter per tool, thereby making the integration environment readily scalable.
Also, unlike OSLC integration that links objects of Jazz based products, the integration of RTC with other ALM tools using RTC adapter facilitates entity and field mappings and ensures full data flow across to.
Kovair RTC Integration Adapter offers the followings:
Change Management
RTC implements the OSLC specification for Change Management systems (OSLC CM). Change Management systems deal with change requests, bug reports, defects, and enhancement requests. In RTC, these are called Work Items.
Work Items are the fundamental mechanism in RTC to track and coordinate development tasks including stories, defects, plan items, and ordinary tasks. Kovair uses the OSLC CM interface to access Work Items in a well-defined manner. You can add, edit, or delete Work Items like defects and tasks in RTC, and replicate them in other integrated tools, such as Quality Center, JIRA, Microsoft TFS, and RequisitePro. You can also create and replicate custom Work Items and custom fields to aid your development activities.
Kovair’s RTC adapter-based integration works bidirectionally and can help synchronize disparate tools from different silos. Synchronization of defects and tasks across tools ensures that they are always correct and are being accessed by the appropriate stakeholders.
Configuration Management
RTC provides essential software version control, workspace management, and parallel development support to the geographically distributed teams. It can improve productivity and application quality by automatically tracking changes to artifacts and enabling rollback to any previous version. You can leverage RTC’s Configuration Management capabilities in other ALM tools using the RTC adapter. Through RTC adapter, you can get information regarding the changesets and file versions maintained in RTC. This information can be used in other integrated tools to track code changes being made against Work Items in those tools.
In the context of Configuration Management, RTC adapter poses one limitation — you cannot checkin/ check-out any RTC file from another integrated tool.Traceability with Change Impact Analysis
Kovair Omnibus’s central framework, in collaboration with Kovair RTC adapter, allows creation and management of traceability relationships between artifacts from RTC and other tools. This is not possible with point-to-point integration wherein only two tools can be integrated at a time. Moreover, due to its flexibility in relationship management, Kovair Omnibus promotes multi-tool proactive and reactive change impact analysis, which is impossible in the case of both point-to-point and single-vendor integration solutions.
Tools Integration
Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform is capable of integrating tools irrespective of their vendors and platforms. Kovair’s adapter based technology makes it very convenient to integrate any tool on the fly. Just like RTC adapter, Kovair provides adapters for several other ALM tools that can be hooked to the Omnibus platform. Thus, the best features of each tool can be used to manage the artifacts or Work Items related to the development projects.
Comments and Attachments
When tools are integrated through the Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform, comments and attachments can be associated with artifacts or Work Items, and these comments and attachments can also flow across the integrated tools.
Consolidated Project Visibility
Automated data-flow and reporting features provide real-time insight into project health. This helps you stay on top of project progress, identify the bottlenecks, and take the right decisions at the right time to ensure project success.
Enhanced Team Collaboration
With integrated Work Item and Software Configuration Management, team members can readily access information about projects and changes that have been requested. Exchanging information is easy, and any changes in artifacts related to Work items are automatically reported to the stakeholders.
How the RTC Adapter Works
The RTC Adapter, developed using JAZZ APIs, provides the mechanism to collect events generated in the RTC and perform actions on the RTC Work Items. The events collected by the RTC adapter are sent to the Execution Engine of Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform.
At the other end of the Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform are other best-of-breed ALM tools, such as HP QC and RequisitePro, which are connected using their respective adapters/connectors developed by Kovair.
The Execution Engine is responsible for retrieving the event messages collected by the RTC adapter, processing those event messages according to pre-defined integration flows, and sending action messages to the other integrated tools through their respective adapters.
This integration scenario using Kovair adapter ensures that the flow of Work Items across RTC and other tools is bidirectional. However, Changeset related information flows in a single direction only — from RTC to other tools.