Line of Business
IBM charts "Rational" path to a smarter planet
Today embedded software is found in cars, mobile communication devices, washing machines, aircraft, robots, traffic management cameras and audio equipment and more. But developing and delivering such software can be a complex task, beset with challenges. Citing real life examples, experts at the IBM Rational Conference in Orlando discuss these challenges, and how they can be successfully confronted.6/4/2009 7:00:00 AM By: Joaquim P. Menezes
New tools
A dozen or so new products were announced at the Rational Conference, with at least three taking direct aim at enhancing software project management.
IBM Rational Insight, for instance, addresses this challenge by providing a dashboard that measures, monitors and analyzes software project performance.
The Insight tool, said IBM executives, can be optimized for an entire gamut roles, from lower-level project managers right up to the CIO.
Cognos, a business intelligence tool, allows Insight to look at the actual artifacts being created -- the business models, requirements, test cases and code.
Insight, says a Canadian analyst, would be handy as a "generic tool" for firms with larger software development projects under way.
"It ties together the low-level developer metrics with overall business direction," noted Howard Kiewe, a senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group in Toronto.
Insight, he said, is more of a generic tool that could help you whether you're developing a smarter product, or you're a more conventional software producer, or you're customizing an ERP system for your company.
Collaborative project and resource management – even across geographical boundaries – is a focus of the second new product announced at the Conference, the IBM Rational Focal Point for Project Management.
The offering that's still in beta is likely to be available by the end of 2009, according to David Locke, director of offerings management for IBM Rational.
A third new offering, the Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF), provides what IBM describes as a framework for measuring results and managing projects.
The tool can measure results allowing project managers to incrementally improve software delivery, IBM said.
MCIF provides a logical methodology to discover problems in the software delivery process. From there it provides a solution.
All that Jazz
All three are products built on the Jazz collaboration platform, which IBM released to open source in 2007.
Hebner describes Jazz as an SOA implementation specific to the domain of software systems delivery.
Software development teams, he noted, often waste a colossal amount of time and resources through faulty workflow – rework, poor communications, outdated information, manual handoffs between team members. "All that is just a recipe for errors and lost productivity."
He said for software project teams, Jazz serves as a massive virtual memory. "It remembers who is working on what, what the requirements are. If those requirements change for some person overseas (for example) it ripples through and updates everybody. It fosters this notion of intelligent collaboration."
For Info-Tech's Kiewe, quite apart from what Jazz can accomplish – the open development model used to create the offering is one of its most compelling facets.
IBM, he noted, is really the first large corporation to embrace such a model.
"It's not open source in that people can't contribute back to the source code. But all the source code is visible and downloadable. Bugs and feature requests can be logged on that site."
That, he said, is radically different from approach adopted by Microsoft (for example) -- which is also a large, established, conservative company.
Page Navigation 1) Embedded software – the silent thread. - Page 12) Complexity confounded. - Page 2
3) All that Jazz. - Page 3
<< Back
