Rational Team Concert Developer for Workgroups

IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) Developer for Workgroups is a collaborative lifecycle management solution designed for small and medium-sized teams of up to 50 developers. RTC supports agile, traditional or hybrid teams. Software developers may use Eclipse, Visual Studio or the web, to access the integrated capabilities of planning, tracking, work items, scm and build. These capabilities of RTC help distributed teams to consistently deliver software at lower cost, faster and with better collaboration.

Features and Benefits

• Collaboration and integration platform
  Improves the productivity of teams and the quality of the work they produce. Simplifies access to team-related information. Supports any process and platform. Reduces the total cost of ownership and administration
• Transparency with multi-level dashboards and reports
  Helps you monitor, scorecard, and collaborate on projects and address problems and bottlenecks before they endanger a project
• Work items
  Improves productivity of a wide range of stakeholders. Improves process integrity with automated traceability across a broad range of development tasks
• Planning: Agile, formal, and hybrid
  Allows teams to adopt good development practices
• Continuous integration – builds
  Improves quality and predictability of development iterations
• Advanced source control
  Improves productivity of developers and quality of their work with in-context collaboration and seamless integrations with other development processes

Rational Team Concert is a team collaboration tool that is built on a scalable, extensible platform that integrates tasks across the software lifecycle. Many aspects of the software development lifecycle are integrated, including iteration planning, process definition, source control, defect tracking, build management, and reporting.

Collaboration and integration across the development lifecycle
Rational Team Concert makes it easy to exchange information directly in the context of your work. If an enhancement request changes, you and other team members are notified of the change automatically. You can reference the change in chat sessions and link to artifacts. Business stakeholders can also automatically stay informed about the status of task changes that interest them.

Several views enable you to share team information. You can track team activity, present information in more detail, or configure which information is visible at any time.

Many aspects of the software development lifecycle are integrated, including agile planning, process definition, source control, defect tracking, build management, and reporting. Each of these aspects is integrated in a single environment. You can track and manage the relationships between artifacts, promote sound development processes, and gather project information automatically and unobtrusively.

Process configuration and customization
Rational Team Concert projects follow a process. A process is the collection of roles, practices, rules, permissions, and guidelines that you use to organize and control the workflow for a project. Rational Team Concert makes it easy and efficient for your team to follow the processes you define. Process alters the behavior of the tool, making user conformance with the process more reliable.

You use a process to define user roles and their permissions for performing operations in the context of a project. The initial process used by a project is defined by a process template. You can modify a template to meet your overall project and team requirements. Each component is process-aware, so you can add rules for behavior in the form of preconditions and follow-up actions.

Process is very customizable. It can be very rigorous or less restrictive, depending on your team's needs. You can configure the process to enforce different rules at different points in the release. For example, you might want to employ a more restrictive process towards the end of a release to reduce the risk of introducing regressions. One way to do this is to require users to get approvals from teams leads and peers before they deliver changes.

Change management
The main feature of change management is work items, which track and coordinate tasks, including stories, defects, plan items, and ordinary tasks. Work items and the workflow process they follow can be customized to suit your project. You can also integrate work items with other change management systems, such as IBM Rational ClearQuest.

Planning
The planning capability provides tools to assist with the planning, tracking, and workload balancing of releases and iterations for entire projects, for teams within those projects, and for individual developers. Plans are accessible to everyone on the team, and can change over the course of the iteration to reflect the team's position and direction.

Software configuration management
The built-in source control system is component-based and built on the Jazz platform. It has strong support for parallel and agile development and geographically distributed teams. It integrates tightly with defect tracking, builds, and process-centric automation. Integrations with other source control systems such as IBM Rational ClearCase are also provided.

Build automation
The automation capability provides build awareness, control, and traceability to the development and test teams. Team members can track build progress, view build alerts and results, request builds, and trace builds to other artifacts such as change sets and work items.

Reporting
The Jazz Team Reports component provides an awareness of the actions, behaviors and progress of a team or project. Visualizing data about the software development process can make certain trends more accessible, when they might otherwise be hidden or obscured. By making this information available at a glance, reports can enable effective decision-making.

Rational Team Concert includes an extensive library of report templates, which you can use to generate reports that illustrate the status of the project. Some examples are reports that show blocking work items; build results; work items by team area; work items by priority; and project activity. You can modify templates and create templates.

Dashboards
A dashboard is a web client component intended to provide information about the project status at a glance. It provides the option to drill down to get more complete information. It also represents the integration point for the data provided by all Jazz components.

Dashboards can be used in a variety of ways:

• Project leads can track project health and trends.
• Teams can discuss status using the dashboard as the data source.
• Team leads can track team progress and balance workload.
• Developers can track their workload.

Eclipse client, Microsoft Visual Studio client, and web interfaces
Rational Team Concert provides users with an Eclipse-based client interface, a Microsoft Visual Studio client interface, and a web interface. The client interfaces provide developers with a rich, integrated development environment for building and delivering artifacts. The web interface is well suited for server and project administration and allows users to access project areas, browse repository information, update tasks, or read about recent events.

Powered by the Jazz technology platform
Rational Team Concert is built on the Jazz technology platform. Jazz is a scalable, extensible team-collaboration platform that integrates tasks across the software lifecycle. The platform also provides useful building blocks and frameworks that facilitate the development of new products and tools.

The Jazz technology platform also supports globally distributed development teams, provides solutions scalable from small teams up through large enterprises, helps teams maintain audit trails and automate bookkeeping, and makes software development more enjoyable. (Please note the Developer for Workgroups edition does not allow distributed SCM)

The Jazz technology platform is developed transparently at jazz.net, where you can explore Jazz capabilities and register to participate. You can open enhancement requests, track schedules, participate in discussion forums, interact with Jazz and Rational Team Concert developers, and see a production deployment of Rational Team Concert and other Jazz-based products. The Jazz and Rational Team Concert development teams self-host on the latest milestone builds that they post to jazz.net.