Rational ClearCase

Simplifying the Process of Change


Featuring Unified Change Management

 

"IDC expects Rational to continue as a market leader through the ClearCase and ClearQuest integration… Clearcase and ClearQuest together bring a new level of power, control, and management to the development process."

IDC, "Rational Makes a Clear Case
for Software Configuration
Management Leadership," 11/98

A Unified Approach to Managing Change

Change is an essential part of software develop-ment, Every enhancement request or defect fix entails managing changes to evolving software artifacts and source code.

Over the past 17 years, Rational Software has worked with hundreds of companies on thou-sands of projects, to help companies build software more efficiently. We noticed that the most successful projects followed a common set of change management practices. We also noticed that it was often difficult to implement these practices, due to lack of tool support.

Our solution: Rational Unified Change Manage-ment (UCM), Rational's "best practices" approach to managing change from requirements to release. Unified Change Management defines a consistent process for managing change through-out the development lifecycle. It is a key com-ponent of the Rational Unified Process a comprehensive framework for delivering best software development practices.

The foundation of UCM is Rational's market-lead-ing change management solutions, Rational ClearCase and Rational ClearQuest.

Rational ClearCase is the world's market-lead-ing configuration management solution. Far more than a version control system, ClearCase helps teams accelerate development cycles, ensure the accuracy of releases, reliably build and patch pre-viously shipped products, and organize a paral-lel development process.

Rational ClearQuest is the industry's most flex-ible change request management solution ClearQuest allows teams to track and manage activities from initial assignment through final resolution, and easily adapts to the way you work.

Together, Rational ClearCase and Rational ClearQuest empower organizations to:

Easy to Adopt
Within Rational ClearCase and Rational ClearQuest, Unified Change Management is implemented with an optional, out-of-the-box development process. This optional process can be adopted on a project-by-project basis. By UCM-enabling a project, organizations automate and accelerate the steps required to:

UCM-enabled projects help every member of the team get up-and-runnmg quickly with built-in change management support.

Managers: Track & Organize Projects
UCM-enabled projects empower managers to graph-ically organize projects, define workflows, and track project metrics. Organizations can define a custom workflow for each activity type, such as a Defect Fix or Enhancement Request. By configuring workflows to mirror existing business processes, organizations avoid the pitfalls of "top-down" process enforcement. Managers can assign incoming activities to the first-available, qualified individual, or match people to assignments on an individual basis. Comprehensive reporting makes it easy Lo balance work loads, identify skill gaps, and ensure that all high-priority tasks are assigned to the right team members.

As projects progress, Rational ClearQuest metrics provide managers with the exact status of their pro-jects When can we ship? Who is overloaded with work? What defects are resolved in Baseline X? Which source code was modified to implement Enhancement Y? Managers can create their own view of data with ClearQuest's flexible query and report templates, or explore predefined Trend, aging, and distribution reports.

Developers: Accelerate Development
By automating many time-consuming tasks, the UCM approach allows developers to concentrate more fully on higher-level activities. Developers get up and running quickly by simply joining a project and selecting an activity. ClearCase automatically populates and maintains developer work areas with the right set of file versions. As work progresses, ClearCase assembles complete change set infor-mation transparently and "behind the scenes", ensuring that all changes are delivered and pro-moted as a consistent unit. Code reviews that once took hours can be accomplished in a matter of min-utes, as Rational ClearCase presents both old and new code side-by-side.

The UCM process strikes just The right balance between code sharing and isolation Private work areas allow developers to protect their work from potentially destabilizing changes made by other developers. Too long a period of isolation, howev-er, can result in difficult integrations, code conflicts and inevitable rework. ClearCase allows develop-ers to work in isolation, then test their changes against the latest team updates. Periodically, devel-opers can also refresh their work areas to reflect the latest project baselines. This highly collabora-tive approach allows developers to identify code conflicts earlier in the development cycle, when They are significantly less costly to fix.

Testers: Streamline QA Activities
The Kational approach to change management replaces hours of QA guesswork with concrete, actionable information. Test professionals can eas-ily identify what enhancement requests and bug fixes have been made between baselines, and con-centrate their efforts on the least stable function-ality. A detailed "Bill of Materials" reports the exact compiler, operating system CPU and source objects associated with a software build, helping engineers pinpoint elusive, configuration-specific build errors.

Release Engineers: Control Quality
With UCM, release engineers manage software qual-ity through explicit baseline creation and promo-tion. The UCM process makes baseline creation fast and easy First, developers invoke a UCM wizard to deliver completed activities to a central project integration area. During the delivery, ClearCase merges all changes with mainline development -handling simple merges automatically, and high-lighting code conflicts for quick resolution when necessary. Next, a designated Release Engineer selects which activities should be included in a new baseline. As the baseline passes QA checks, it is promoted to successive quality levels, such as Initial, Built, Tested, Released, and Rejected. Baseline management provides The entire team with a set of stable, consistent file versions to work with. Comprehensive change set support allows organizations to control, track, and back out of changes in dynamic environments.

Automate Team Collaboration
Today's software development teams are as varied and dynamic as the projects they support. Today's development teams span multiple cities and con-tinents, development platforms, and functional skill sets. What's required is a change management solu-tion that can unify these full-time and part-time, local and remote, dedicated and occasional con-tributors into a coherent group.

Rational's team-unifying solution provides univer-sal access to common project information, when and where it's needed. Any team member can access project metrics, review personal or group To Do Lists, explore change request history, or look up current activity or baseline status.Rational ClearCase supports teams of any size or configuration, including cross-platform, distrib-uted, and cross-functional teams.

Rational ClearCase provides several ways for team members to participate fully in the development process. Remote team members, customers and other stakeholders can access project information through universal Web clients. For organizations pursuing collaborative development across cities or continents, Rational offers the only secure, high-performance solution, based on proven, ClearCase MultiSite technology.

Rational's change management solution gives orga-nizations the flexibility they need to leverage all development resources, no matter where they are located. The Rational solution easily adapts to changing organizational needs, and positions com-panies for success in fast-changing, rapid-growth environments.

Support Cross-Functional Teams
Rational's change management solution works hand-in-hand with leading Rational tools to sup-port cross-functional teams composed of cus-tomers, analysts, system architects, developers, and testers. Integrations with Rational products go far beyond shared icons to provide meaningful func-tional integration and common data access. Together, Rational ClearCase and Rational Suited-support every phase of the software development lifecycle.

Scale to Meet Your Evolving Needs
The Rational approach to change management scales seamlessly from small development shops to global, 24õ7 development efforts. ClearQuest data is stored in scalable, SQL databases, while ClearCase distributes development assets across one or more high-performance databases. Both ClearCase and ClearQuest support a full comple-ment of Windows and UNIX platforms and IDE integrations. Full-featured Web clients provide universal data access from any Web browser.

Unify Teams Around the World
Rational Clear-Case offers the only proven, high-performance solution for geographically distrib-uted project teams, ClearCase MultiSite is the industry standard for remote team-based collabo-ration, making non-stop, parallel development a practical reality. Explicit "publish and subscribe" relationships empower teams to share code and collaborate on projects across sites.

Accelerate e-business
Rational ClearCase provides the ideal Web devel-opment infrastructure for organizing and acceler-ating mission-critical e-development projects. ClearCase empowers Web development teams to accelerate publishing cycles, ensure the accuracy of published content., organize an effective, dis-tributed Web development process, and roll back to any current or previous Web site version.

Unify Content and Code
While most organizations actively manage their back-end applications, front-end Web content is typically subject to informal, ad-hoc or arbitrary change management procedures. The end result is broken links, garbled scripts, and missing or unauthorized Web content. Rational ClearCase provides a single solution that spans both Web code and content. By managing all Web assets with common tools and procedures, organiza-tions lower operating costs while extending best practices support to their most strategic projects.

Organize Web Staging
Rational ClearCase "Views" offer all the advan-tages of multiple, simultaneous Web staging sites, with none of the disadvantages of copy-based models.ClearCase Views allow testers to test one Web release, content developers to work on another Web release, and Webmasters to roll-back to a third Web release - all without introducing data redundancy or copy errors. Testers and approvers can verify Web updates with maximum efficiency - and without having to "freeze" ongoing development.

ClearCase Views allow your team to:

Reduce Time-to-Web
ClearCase's concurrent development environ-ment allows multiple contributors to work on the same Web content, preview outcomes in HTML or XML, then safely and selectively merge final output. A highly efficient, test-in-place devel-opment model allows contributors to edit content in isolation, then instantly preview The results of their work against The latest Web changes.

Secure e-business Assets
Whether you arc upgrading a single e-commerce application or deploying an entire Web site, Rational ClearCase reduces the risk of staging, deployment, and rollback. Unlike most configura-tion management products, ClearCase versions directories and folders to ensure Web site integrity. With Rational ClearCase, no mailer what happens, your critical Web assets can't be lost, overwritten, or sabotaged.

Protect Your Investments
The Rational approach to e-development is open, extensible, and standards-based. As an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Rational drives standards in key Internet technologies, and is co-editor of the WebDAV specification for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning. An investment in Rational change management solutions will keep your team ahead of the technology curve for years to come.

References
"We are able to do transnational development that we were absolutely unable to do before. We can make use of skilled programmers wherever we find them, and avoid layoffs and rehire cycles...The Rational solution truly lets us use resources in a way we never could before."

Charlotte Payne, Senior Engineer, Siemens ICN

"One of the most powerful features of ClearCase is that, to each developer if looks as though they're working on a focal source repository. They don't need to know that the database is being shared across the world."

Jamie Echlin, Configuration Manager, SPSS Inc.

"Whatever the industry, ClearCase customers have one thing in common: there is a direct correlation between the software they write and the revenue the company brings in. ClearCase helps teams of all sizes bring in the bacon sooner. "

Open System Advisors,
upon awarding Rational ClearCase
the 1999 A-List Award,
Enterprise IT Asset Management category.

"If you look at it from a technical perspective, ClearCase looks like it was designed for the Web. You can test the functionality or emulate the functionality of a Web site very, very quickly with it."

Sean Mulligan, E-commerce Consultant, Vircon, Inc.

"ClearCase eliminates chaos and enforces and creates order in the system."

Bernie Miller, Release Engineer, MyWay.com

ClearCase Specifications

Client Requirements
Minimum: 64 MB RAM, 35 MB Hard Disk Space

Server Requirements
Minimum: 64 MB RAM (128ÌÂ recommended), 70 MB Hard Disk Space (depending on code base size)

Supported Web Browsers

Supported Web Servers

Supported Environments

Product Integrations

ClearQuest Specifications

Minimum System Requirements

ClearQuest Web Clients

ClearQuest Web Server

Supported Databases

Accelerate Your Success
Rational Professional Services accelerates your team's ability to deliver complex software appli-cations using Rational ClearCase. national's comprehensive worldwide services include indi-vidual and team training, QuickStart technology adoption, consulting, mentoring, assessments, and technical support.

Where Can Rational ClearCase Be Bought in Russia?
Rational Suite can be bought in Interface Ltd., Russian Partner of Rational Software. The product is also available in Online Software Shop

Where Can I Get Additional Information On Any Rational Software Product?

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Interface Ltd.

Tel: 7+(095) 135-55-00, 135-25-19
E-mail: mail@interface.ru
http://www.interface.ru
Ïîäãîòîâèëè: s-novikov@interface.ru
tkachev@interface.ru

Äàòà: 01.02.2000