Rational Team Concert

A collaborative delivery environment that empowers distributed, agile software project teams to simplify, automate, and govern software delivery.

IBM Rational Team Concert is a complete agile collaborative development environment agile planning, source code management, work item management, build management, and project health, along with integrated reporting and process support. Team Concert can be implemented in either a unified or modular manner. It connects dispersed development teams to increase individual and team productivity, compress development cycles, and rapidly deliver high-quality software. Team Concert is available in several editions for differing organizational requirements. The 2.0 and 2.0.0.1 releases delivers dramatic new value with global enterprise readiness, collaborative application lifecycle management, and bridges to existing environments.

Rational Team Concert can improve the productivity of your teams and the quality of the work they produce by allowing each team to teach the tool its best practices. Rational Team Concert uses this knowledge to automatically detect violations of your teams' process the moment they happen.

Team awareness

Rational Team Concert knows your project teams, their internal organization, and the artifacts they are working on. It greatly simplifies the access to team-related information or performing team-related operations. To mention only one example, in order to subscribe to a feed with all events specific to a team, just select the team in the user interface and select 'Subscribe to Team Events' from the context menu.

Work item tracking

Work items are the fundamental mechanism in Rational Team Concert to track and coordinate development tasks and workflows, all governed by your team's associated process. In addition work items are the hub for linkage between many Rational Team Concert artifacts (e.g. builds, work items, and change sets), as well as providing support for integration with other products. Work Item customization can be used to create new work item types or modify existing types in order to support the development process that your team follows.

Source control

The Source Control component of Rational Team Concert is a component-based version control system built on the Jazz platform. Its focus is on supporting geographically distributed teams and has strong support for parallel and agile development. It's built from the ground up to support a highly integrated collaborative development environment, integration with defect tracking, integration with builds, and process-centric automation.

Agile planning

The Agile Planning component of Rational Team Concert provides tools to assist with the planning and execution of development iterations. It provides tools to create iteration plans for teams, to create individual plans for developers, and to track the progress during an iteration and to balance the work load of developers. Plans are accessible to everyone on the team, and can change dynamically over the course of the iteration to reflect the team's position and direction.

Continuous builds

The Team Build component integrates the team's build system into Rational Team Concert, providing build awareness, control, and traceability to the team. Team members can track build progress, view build alerts and results, request builds, and trace builds to other artifacts like change sets and work items.

Transparency/project health

The Team Reports and Web Dashboards components of Rational Team Concert help you to keep tabs on the health of your project. Dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of work item queries, event feeds, reports, and other items that are critical to understanding your progress. Reports provide both real-time views and historical trends of builds, streams, work items, and other artifacts that your team works with.

Administration

The Jazz Team Server provides a web-based administrative UI for setup, configuration, and administration of the server. The server configuration can be modified and saved by authorized administrators through a browser, in many instances without requiring a restart. Administrators can view key statistics and see the requests currently being executed. The web UI also provides an easy-to-use server setup wizard that guides you through setting up common configuration settings, such as: database configuration, email notifications, user management, and LDAP integration.

Integrations

Rational Team Concert also integrates with other products, such as Rational Quality Manager, Rational ClearQuest and Rational ClearCase. The integration with Rational Quality Manager and Rational ClearQuest is part of the Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management (C/ALM) effort which will also include Rational Requirements Composer.

Process awareness and customizability

Rational Team Concert can improve the productivity of your teams and the quality of the work they produce by allowing each team to teach the tool its best practices. Rational Team Concert uses this knowledge to automatically detect violations of your teams' process the moment they happen.

Team awareness

Rational Team Concert knows your project teams, their internal organization, and the artifacts they are working on. It greatly simplifies the access to team-related information or performing team-related operations. To mention only one example, in order to subscribe to a feed with all events specific to a team, just select the team in the user interface and select 'Subscribe to Team Events' from the context menu.

Work item tracking

Work items are the fundamental mechanism in Rational Team Concert to track and coordinate development tasks and workflows, all governed by your team's associated process. In addition work items are the hub for linkage between many Rational Team Concert artifacts (e.g. builds, work items, and change sets), as well as providing support for integration with other products. Work Item customization can be used to create new work item types or modify existing types in order to support the development process that your team follows.

Source control

The Source Control component of Rational Team Concert is a component-based version control system built on the Jazz platform. Its focus is on supporting geographically distributed teams and has strong support for parallel and agile development. It's built from the ground up to support a highly integrated collaborative development environment, integration with defect tracking, integration with builds, and process-centric automation.

Agile planning

The Agile Planning component of Rational Team Concert provides tools to assist with the planning and execution of development iterations. It provides tools to create iteration plans for teams, to create individual plans for developers, and to track the progress during an iteration and to balance the work load of developers. Plans are accessible to everyone on the team, and can change dynamically over the course of the iteration to reflect the team's position and direction.

Continuous builds

The Team Build component integrates the team's build system into Rational Team Concert, providing build awareness, control, and traceability to the team. Team members can track build progress, view build alerts and results, request builds, and trace builds to other artifacts like change sets and work items.

Transparency/project health

The Team Reports and Web Dashboards components of Rational Team Concert help you to keep tabs on the health of your project. Dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of work item queries, event feeds, reports, and other items that are critical to understanding your progress. Reports provide both real-time views and historical trends of builds, streams, work items, and other artifacts that your team works with.

Administration

The Jazz Team Server provides a web-based administrative UI for setup, configuration, and administration of the server. The server configuration can be modified and saved by authorized administrators through a browser, in many instances without requiring a restart. Administrators can view key statistics and see the requests currently being executed. The web UI also provides an easy-to-use server setup wizard that guides you through setting up common configuration settings, such as: database configuration, email notifications, user management, and LDAP integration.

Integrations

Rational Team Concert also integrates with other products, such as Rational Quality Manager, Rational ClearQuest and Rational ClearCase. The integration with Rational Quality Manager and Rational ClearQuest is part of the Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management (C/ALM) effort which will also include Rational Requirements Composer.

Courtesy: www.ibm.com