IBM developerWorks

April's Jazz.net library round up....

IBM developerWorks — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

If you've not checked out Jazz.net recently, here's some of the great content you may have missed over the course of this month. There's a wide breadth of content types below, ranging from betas to videos, workarounds and known issues to workshops. There's something for everyone on jazz.net; we hope this will help you find what you need:

...(read more)

Upcoming ALM Office Hour Events for March and April

IBM developerWorks — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:57:53 GMT

The ALM Community is planning the following ALM Office Hour events for March and April:　

Is it better to deploy IBM Rational Team Concert incrementally or all at once?
Event Date/Time: March 8, 2013 from 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Eastern Time)
Are you gearing to adopt or you have already successfully adopted IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC)? Join us to discuss some successful RTC adoption patterns based on customer experiences. You will learn about tips and tricks on what has worked well for others when introducing a new set of development tools to your teams. This discussion will be led by Rolf Nelson, Senior Product Manager for IBM Rational Team Concert.

Agile Architecture
Event Date/Time: April 5th, 2013 from 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EST)
Agile development is a time boxed iterative approach that encourages rapid and flexible response to change through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams and customers. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary architecture and design and incremental delivery of software to achieve the earliest possible benefit based upon value, risk, priority and necessity. A well functioning, agile team works with just enough process to get the job done but to achieve real productivity improvements and continuously deliver on their objectives, they need sufficient technological infrastructure, or what some have termed "Architectural Runway."

Make sure you email, tweet, and/or blog about these excellent upcoming ALM events!

Author: Fariz Saracevic (@FarizSaracevic) Lifecycle Scenario Architect

Find the original post by AcdntlPoet here.

Building jQuery Mobile Web Applications in Rational Application Developer

IBM developerWorks — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:40:46 GMT

Building jQuery Mobile Web Applications in Rational Application Developer -This video shows step by step how to build a complete jQuery mobile application using the Rich Page Editor. You will see examples of how to graphically build, navigate through and link multiple application screens. The video includes JavaScript source editing samples that show how information can be exchanged between the mobile application and a back-end service. You will also learn about a feature called "Smart Highlight" which graphically displays jQuery selections. Rich Page Editor with jQuery Mobile support is included in Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software 8.5.1 and in IBM Worklight 5.0.5.

To learn more about Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software: http://goo.gl/kRzRS
To download a trial version: http://goo.gl/qd8Pe
To learn more about IBM Worklight Studio: http://goo.gl/PZlbL
To download a free version: http://goo.gl/7JOxY

Table of contents:

00:26 Sample mobile web application overview
01:36 Web page creation wizard
02:15 Rich Page Editor user interface
03:26 Adding widgets using the palette
03:39 Direct text editing
04:38 Floating toolbar
05:53 Editing attributes with the Properties view
07:44 Adding page widgets
10:00 Adding images
12:01 Using JavaScript to dynamically populate widgets
13:13 Smart Highlight feature
15:05 Using JavaScript to Submit information to a server
16:00 Adding dialog boxes
17:07 Switching between pages using the Mobile Navigation view
17:18 Linking pages and dialogs

View original post by AcdntlPoet here.

Learning: Process Enactment Workshop for Rational solution for CLM 2012

IBM developerWorks — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:00:00 GMT

The fine folks on Jazz.net have recently published a new workshop and labs to guide you through Process Enactment Workshop for the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management 2012!

This self-guided workshop will walk you through process enactment in Rational Team Concert including the interaction between RTC and Rational Method composer, as well as describing the process to your team members.

The workshop also contains labs around the following topics to help you learn by doing:

Lab 1: Set Up the Process Enactment Environment
Lab 2: Understand the Process Development Lifecycle
Lab 3: Configuring Work Items
Lab 4: Work Item Customization
Lab 5: Work Item Customization with JavaScript

So why not take this opportunity to build your personal knowledge base and become even more familiar with process enactment for CLM by clicking over to Jazz.net and starting this new workshop and associated labs. You'll be glad you did!

View original post by AcdntlPoet here.

Effective Collaboration for Better Design with IBM Rational Software Architect v8.5

IBM developerWorks — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:10:00 GMT

Effective Collaboration for Better Design with IBM Rational Software Architect v8.5 -This presentation from the "Good Design is Good Business" webcast series focuses on the Design Manager extension for Rational Software Architect and the design management capabilities on a larger scale.

Design Management: http://www.jazz.net/projects/design-management

Pragmatic Architecture: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/jlmarechaux/?lang=en

Contents:

1:24 Disclaimer
2:07 What is Design Management
3:21 RSA and Rhapsody DM v4 Beta
8:15 Shared Administration
10:06 Design and Lifecycle Projects
11:29 In-context Collaboration
15:03 Automate Design Reviews
26:21 Lifecycle Traceability
31:13 Impact Analysis
34:07 Money That Matters
38:24 Summary

Find the original post by AcdntlPoet here.

The three pillars of Pragmatic architecture

IBM developerWorks — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:10:00 GMT

Yesterday, I was co-presenting an InformationWeek webcast on Agile Development: Three Pillars of Success. With Vishy Ramaswamy , the lead architect for Design Manager, we talked about some agile architecture practices and how these practices were adopted by the IBM development team to create and deliver the Design Manager product.

During the Q&A session, there was a question that we saw a question that we did not answer (lack of time, too many good questions). It was something like: “What should we pay attention to when we try to adopt agile architecture practices on our projects?”

When I started this blog, I used the following description (from http://bitly.com/Sg2FQe) to define what Pragmatic Architecture is:

To summarize a bit, I would say that the three pillars of pragmatic architecture are:

Team collaboration
Evolutionary design
Simplicity

Find the original post by jl.marechaux here.

Top 12 Rational software articles in 2012

IBM developerWorks — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:34:00 GMT

Sometimes I wish I had a crystal ball so I could see what you want to read on developerWorks. But I don’t, so I turned to what I do have: History. I went through all of the reports and identified the 12 most popular articles in 2012. I chose twelve articles because, well, it was 2012, although I don’t think I’ll use the same method in 2050. In this instance, history didn’t prove very helpful. Perhaps it’s because there are, on average 590,000 of you who visit our site monthly. Or because we published 139 articles, which gave you a wide variety to choose from.

So, given that I don’t have a crystal ball and history isn’t showing trends, I’m going to the source. You. What would you like to see published on the developerWorks Rational site this year? Be sure to post your requests in the comments section. While you’re thinking about that question, take a look at the top 12 articles published in 2012.

Create editable sequence diagrams with Rational Software Architect
By Bala Subramanian Vetrivel, Technical Specialist, IBM

Sequence diagrams play a key role in documentation. These diagrams easily depict the flow, interaction among objects, and message communication. Bala Subramanaian Vetrivel describes how to generate sequence diagrams for Java projects by using IBM® Rational® Software Architect for WebSphere Software, Version 7.5.4. He also explains the limitations of sequence diagrams that cannot be edited, the need for generating editable sequence diagrams, and steps to generate editable diagrams.
Document and automate processes with Rational Method Composer and Jazz: Part 4. Create new process assets (be sure to read parts 1-3 too)
By Ricardo Balduino, Senior Software Engineer, IBM

This series of articles about the importance of documenting methods focuses on integrating Rational® Method Composer with Rational Team Concert™, which is based on Jazz™ technology. Part 1 explained the value of an integrated approach, and the subsequent articles use sample scenarios to describe how organizations use these integrated tools. Part 2 described how a team used a process included in Rational Method Composer, and Part 3 covered how they extended the process description to accommodate new process needs and then automated that process in Rational Team Concert. In this article, Part 4, Ricardo Balduino describes how the team starts with and then adapts existing practices from Rational Method Composer and creates a new process template in Rational Team Concert to get the team started and to run the project.
What's new in Rational Software Architect 8.5 and Design Manager 4 beta: Improved collaboration, reuse, technology support, and easier adoption
By Steve Arnold, Senior Technical Consultant, IBM

IBM Rational Software Architect Version 8.5 introduces technology support for Spring, Hibernate, Struts, and Java 7, and makes adoption easier by providing a Microsoft Visio import option. This new version also includes the Design Manager Version 4 beta, which introduces simplified team working and improves reuse. Steve Arnold describes these and other highlights of this release.
Representing nonfunctional aspects using TOGAF ArchiMate
By Fabio Castiglioni, Senior IT Architect, IBM, and Francesco Pedullá, Executive Architect, IBM

The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and its modeling language, ArchiMate, are increasingly popular techniques for documenting and evolving the architecture of an enterprise. Several tools, including Rational® System Architect support them. However, ArchiMate lacks the elements needed to describe the nonfunctional aspects of the enterprise, thereby limiting the usefulness of the resulting enterprise architecture in environments, such as cloud, where service levels are primary business requirements. Fabrio Castiglioni and Francesco Pedullá show how to extend the ArchiMate metamodel to build a nonfunctional model extension that goes from business to technical architecture. They also provide a simple customization to download, so that you can use the new metamodel extension in Rational System Architect.
Calculate your return on investment for software and systems
By Murray Cantor, Distinguished Engineer, IBM

The term "return on investment" (ROI) is frequently used to describe the benefit derived from investments in software and systems or other business investments. To better align software and systems investments, there are different kinds of ROI answers to different business questions: Have we received a good return on the investments to date? Should we continue to invest in the project? What will be the total ROI over the life of the software or system? Murray Cantor provides the different ROI calculations to answer these questions.
Integrate Rational ALM applications with SAP Solution Manager: A unified approach to managing and testing SAP and non-SAP projects
By Bernd Eberhardt, Product Manager, IBM

Businesses with SAP environments that need to adapt to changing needs quickly will benefit from an open, extensible ALM (application lifecycle management) platform that is based on industry standards. With tools that scale existing processes, reduce costs, and use a quality-based approach, you will meet business objectives efficiently, too. Bernd Eberhardt explains how and why integrating SAP's Solution Manager with Rational ALM applications optimizes deployment for SAP and non-SAP projects.
Reasons for resistance to enterprise architecture and ways to overcome it
By Jan K. Gravesen, Executive Industry Architect, IBM

Since the mid-1990s, enterprise architecture has been evolving as an independent design discipline in the area between strategy and architecture. Although interest has been growing in recent years, the discipline is still considered immature, and many enterprises remain ambivalent or skeptical. Jan Gravesen discusses the considerable value that enterprise architecture can bring and how it can be successfully implemented to overcome much of that organizational skepticism.
Advantages and options of private cloud computing
By Sandra Sergi Santos, Software Engineering Specialist, IBM

When we think of computer resources in the cloud, we usually think of public clouds, such as the ones offered by Google or Amazon, with infrastructure or applications shared by millions of clients worldwide, through the Internet. Some organizations, because of their organizational cultures or for security or regulatory concerns, cannot move directly into public clouds, but they have the option of private clouds. Sandra Sergi Santos explains the advantages and ways to use them to optimize your investments, processes, and infrastructure.
IBM PureSystems: A game changer in the development, deployment, and management of IT applications
By Steve Abrams, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Cloud Architect, IBM, and Timothy Hahn, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for Enterprise Tools, IBM

IBM® PureSystems™ is the first offering in a brand new system category from IBM — a new class of systems known as "Expert Integrated Systems." The technology is designed to get IT organizations up and running in as little as four hours, cutting months off the time required to deploy new applications. PureSystems combines the flexibility of a general-purpose system, the elasticity of the cloud, and the simplicity of an appliance. This introduction by Steve Abrams and Timothy Hahn explains further and describes how application development tools and the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) complement PureSystems to provide a streamlined application development, test, and production environment.
Continuous integration in agile development: How agile methods, continuous integration, and test-driven enhance design and development of complex systems
By Martin R. Bakal, Worldwide Offering Manager, Electronics Industry, IBM

Martin Bakal explores how agile development, continuous integration (CI), and test-driven development (TDD) techniques can be employed in embedded software development. When applied as part of an architecture-based approach, these combined practices provide both high quality and project flexibility.
What's new in IBM Rational Rhapsody 8.0 and Rhapsody Design Manager 4.0: Introducing new requirements workflow optimized for systems engineers, guides for new users, kits for ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 safety-critical development
By Paul Urban, Senior Systems Market Manager, IBM Corporation

IBM® Rational® Rhapsody® 8.0 and Rational Rhapsody Design Manager 4.0 provide simplified design collaboration with new systems engineering workflow with a Jazz technology-based database repository that unifies requirements and design. Paul Urban also gives you highlights of other additions or enhancements: A single source of truth based on OSLC integration; reference workflow with certificate from the TÜV SÜD for development under ISO 26262 Road Vehicles Functional Safety and IEC 61508 Functional Safety standards; enhanced user experience and productivity with solution-focused guidance to assist new users; updates for UPDM 2.0, SysML 1.3, and AUTOSAR 4.0 and 3.2; improvements for usability and performance improving systems engineering workflows and agile embedded and real-time software development. These new versions also add many usability enhancements and improvements for systems engineering and safety-critical development.
How early Integration testing enables agile development
By Monica Luke, Lifecycle Scenario Architect, IBM

It's hard to deliver on the agile principle of "done, done, done" for complex, heterogeneous systems. Monica Luke explains how service virtualization can improve team collaboration and align the independent test organization's focus on the same milestone as the development team.

Original post by robinw can be found here.

New content on developerWorks Rational, January 9

IBM developerWorks — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 23:06:00 GMT

Nominations for IBM Champions are now open. Do you know someone who is an exceptional contributor to the Rational software technical community? Nominate him or her as a Champion for Rational software today.

We know you've been working hard polishing your Innovate presentation so we've extended the submission deadline until January 21. Already finished yours? Submit it here.

Share your knowledge and help others who use Rational software by writing a developerWorks article. Find out what makes a good developerWorks article and how to proceed.

Interested in more IBM Rational news?

Three steps to rapid development of high-quality medical devices

By: Keith Collyer, PhD, Senior Solution Manager, Electronics and Medical Devices Industry Solutions, IBM, Martin R. Bakal, Worldwide Offering Manager, Electronics Industry, IBM, and Paridhi Verma, Go-to-Market Manager, Electronics Industry, IBM

Medical device developers face challenges that are different from those in developing products in most other industries. Chief among these is the imperative of compliance with safety regulations and industry standards. Three IBM experts describe ways to enhance key processes and improve and integrate to accelerate development, yet still produce high-quality devices that comply with regulations.

Products: Rational DOORS, Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, Rational Rhapsody

Improve safety-related software development with a model-based testing workflow

By: Paul Urban, Senior Systems Market Manager, IBM Corporation and Udo Brockmeyer, PhD, CEO, BTC Embedded Systems AG

Developing safety-critical software, where failure can result in injury or loss of life, such as in airplanes, automobiles, trains, or medical devices, requires extra care and effort. The delivery of safe code that is compliant with strict development standards and guidelines such as DO-178C, DO-178B, ISO 26262, IEC 61508, or IEC 62304, can result in increased time and cost of the project. This article describes how to extend the advantages of using the Rhapsody Reference workflow included with the IBM Rational Rhapsody Kit for ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 for development of safety-critical applications. You will learn about the Rhapsody Reference workflow, and how to use model-based testing with the Rational Rhapsody TestConductor Add On to verify the model and the generated code. This reduces the time to deliver high-quality software yet still complies with safety standards.

Product: Rational Rhapsody

Error handling in embedded SQL for C/C++ on IBM z/OS systems

By: Francesco Cassullo, Software Developer, IBM and Igor Todorovski, Software Developer, IBM

This is a guide to detecting SQL errors in C/C++ applications with embedded SQL on the IBM z/OS platform. It includes sample code for performing simple error-checking and a more advanced technique for more in-depth error analysis. All material is based on and tested with IBM z/OS DB2 Versions 8 to 10 and z/OS XL C/C++ compilers V1R11 to V1R13.

Product: C/C++ Compilers

Featured download: IBM Rational Rhapsody

IBM Rational Rhapsody family provides multiple editions to help systems engineers and embedded software developers analyze, design, develop, test, and deliver embedded, real-time systems and software.

This week we are also highlighting the following items on our pages that you may find of interest.

The Innovate call for papers has been extended to January 21

IBM Champion nominations are open

Know someone who is an exceptional contributor to the Rational software technical community? Nominate a champion for Rational software today.

Downloads:

Rational DOORS Web Access Trial

Try Rational Team Concert on the cloud

Evaluate Rational Quality Manager

Events:

Webcast: Reporting on Rational Rhapsody Models with Rhapsody Publishing Engine - Jan 11 @ 12pm ET

Webcast: Agile Development: Three Pillars of Success , January 22 @ 12 pm ET

Webcast: Creating Interface Specifications with Rational DOORS and Rational Rhapsody - Feb 8 @ 12 pm ET

Original post by Patty_Orben can be found here.

Managing Your Requirements 101 -- A Refresher Part 1: What is requirements management and why is it important?

IBM developerWorks — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 23:10:00 GMT

The world of requirements management has developed significantly in the last decade or so and has increasingly become one of the corner stones of successful software and systems engineering projects. We have been discussing various aspects of the domain from a best practices perspective and how tools can help managing your requirements efficiently and effectively.

Starting today we will discuss various aspects of the requirements management discipline at a bird’s eye view level. These are meant to be introductory in nature and also intend to serve as refreshers for those who are already in the field. The domain and best practices have developed to an enormous level of sophistication that; it is difficult to cover everything in a set of blog posts. However we intend to make these posts as a quick reference and starting point for you to think seriously about the domain.

Have you heard about the Gaudi’s unfinished Cathedral or Airane 5 explosion? The former one is a hundred year project still under progress which couldn’t be finished because of unclear and changing requirements and the latter one resulted in over $7 billion loss when the rocket exploded on its first voyage due to a software error; specifically floating point number error. The importance of requirements management can be established from three unique perspectives – project overshoot and thus missing the market opportunity due to unclear and changing requirements; project failures due to unmet or misunderstood requirements and finally cost burden due to errors and missed requirements found late in the development cycle.

In a classic IEEE Spectrum article, Robert N. Charette writes about Why Software Fails. Among the top reasons for failure of software projects are poor definition of requirements, poor management of risk, communication failure among stakeholders and increasing complexity of projects. In IBM GBS, ineffective requirements managements in one among the top five reasons for troubled projects. Many research firms (Standish Group’s CHAOS report, Gartner, CMU-SEI) and academicians (A Davis, Robert B.Grady, Steve Easterbrook) have studied and quantified the failure rates of software projects (for example, in the above IEEE article Robert opines that 40-50% of software development time is spent on rework and cost of fixing a bug in the field can be as high as 100 times compared to when fixed at development stage). In all of them, the preliminary reasons for failures or overshoots are ineffective management of requirements.

So what exactly is requirements management?

Before moving to requirements management, let’s understand what a requirement is? A requirement can be anything from an abstract need to a well drilled down implementation detail of a system. Essentially it can be considered the detailed view of a need under consideration. IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology defines a requirement as a condition or capability needed by a user to solve a problem or achieve an objective; or a condition or capability that must be met or possessed by a system or system component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed documents; or a documented representation of a condition or capability as in former two. Thus what a requirement essentially represents depends on to whom we are talking to – it could be the need to a client; a business requirement for customers; a system requirement for vendors or a specification for a developer and tester. We will come to the different types of requirements later. Requirements Management can be considered the management of requirements essentially from when a customer provides the needs or a product development process is started. It includes managing the definition, elaboration and changing requirements during the development cycle and systems development. Peter Zielczynski, a requirements management expert defines the following major steps in requirements management (Requirements Management Using IBM® Rational® RequisitePro®, Peter Zielczynski).

Establishing a requirements management plan
Requirements elicitation
Developing the Vision document
Creating use cases
Supplementary specification
Creating test cases from use cases
Creating test cases from the supplementary specification
System design

Zave (Classification of Research Efforts in Requirements Engineering. ACM Computing Surveys (1997)) defines Requirements Engineering as “the branch of software engineering concerned with the real-world goals for, functions of, and constraints on software systems. It is also concerned with the relationship of these factors to precise specifications of software behavior, and to their evolution over time and across software families.” While in practical terms, this could be considered same as requirements management, we can say requirements engineering addresses various aspects of requirements development; requirements management is the set of processes in systems and software engineering that interfaces with requirements engineering. We will try to delve into more details in another post when we consider V&V (Verification & Validation) model.

Original post by VijaySankar can be found here.

What are your New Year's Resolutions?

IBM developerWorks — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 20:52:00 GMT

So 2012 is in the past and it's time for your team to look ahead to 2013. Brian Bryson, Rob Retchless and I recently discussed New Year's Resolutions in our latest Software Threads podcast.

We agreed that 2013 is about fostering an environment that supports an extended agile team by implementing new practices that enable continuous software delivery. With a heavy focus on three areas, DevOps, Customer Collaboration and Incremental Design.

Resolution #1: Connect with operations

Agile teams must include operations in their team discussions and decisions to ensure new updates and fixes can be deployed rapidly. As Doctor Who says, "Patience is for wimps." And with the increasingly competitive mobile market, consumers are not patient and will not wait for weeks or even days for fixes and expect new features on a regular basis. Getting the right practices to make this work is a delicate endeavor as dev and ops have somewhat conflicting agendas; development is about pushing out their latest innovations and ops is about controlling all of the Enterprise components and assuring they are working and performing 24x7.

Resolution #2: Collaborate with customers more often

With the long tail economy that has accompanied the mobile movement, agile teams must find a way to obtain and integrate customer feedback more often. Face to face meetings and advisory boards are great, but can only be feasibly done once or twice a year and often exclude sometimes very important customers that are unable or unwilling to attend. Using new media to connect and engage with customers is imperative. Some of the ideas for continuous customer feedback include:

Using tracking tools like Rational Team Concert to collect new story requests or for reporting defects
Leveraging cloud services like Suggestion Box to gather unsolicited feedback
Conducting frequent lightweight surveys using online tools like Survey Monkey
Employing online video chat tools like Google Hangout for more informal yet deeper engagements
Providing new pre-production iterations to customers so they can kick the tires and ensure their story or fix was correctly interpreted

Resolution #3: Adopt an incremental approach to design
Closely related to customer feedback is the practice of incremental design. With the new bar that Apple has set for user experience and navigation, teams must be disciplined in their approach of User Experience and Design. There is nothing more frustrating than downloading a new app that doesn't behave in a intuitive manner. Organizations are going to have to look at integrating design into their agile practice or risk delivering apps that customers will never use.

So for 2013, think about Continuous Customer Feedback to gather the right requirements, Incremental Design to assure the correct interpretation of those requirements and a DevOps strategy to deliver the right product at the right time and gain a competitive edge.

Please take a moment and share your team's New Year's Resolutions? And you are invited to subscribe to our podcast Software Threads. Our next three podcasts will take a closer look at these three resolutions.

Original post by Holitza found here.

A three part series: Getting Started with IBM Rational Functional Tester v8.3

IBM developerWorks — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 16:46:00 GMT

Getting Started with IBM Rational Functional Tester v8.3, Part 1- This 3-part video demonstration series explains how to get up and running quickly with Rational Functional Tester. Part 1 of the series explains how install the product and activate licenses. Rational Functional Tester Information Center for 8.3 releases:http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/rfthelp/v8r3/index.jsp

Getting Started with IBM Rational Functional Tester v8.3, Part 2- Part 2 of the series explains how to record a simple functional test script, play it back and view the playback logs.

Getting Started with IBM Rational Functional Tester v8.3, Part 3- Part 3 explains other non-mandatory but useful tasks such as recording using Java Scripting, enabling your test environment manually and viewing product help.

Rational Functional Tester Information Center for 8.3 releases:http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/rfthelp/v8r3/index.jsp

Original post by AcdntlPoet found here.

New content on developerWorks Rational

IBM developerWorks — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 16:00:00 GMT

I'm sitting in my office in Massachusetts but my thoughts are with the town of Newtown, CT. We at dW Rational are horrified at the great loss they have suffered and, as parents, hold our own children just a little tighter each night, wishing they could do the same. It was with a heavy heart that we finished this week's publish but as we returned our children to normal schedules on Monday, we pushed ourselves to do the same.

We have some great articles for you this, our last publication week of 2012. We look forward to another successful year in 2013. In fact, the first article of 2013 is sitting in my inbox waiting for me to code it before I start vacation. Take care of each other.

- Patty

Share your knowledge and help others who use Rational software by writing a developerWorks article. Find out what makes a good developerWorks article and how to proceed.

Interested in more IBM Rational news?

Would you like to present at Innovate in Orlando? Our call for session proposals is open until January 14. Polish your ideas and send them in!

Adapt and scale agile requirements practices in a DevOps environment

By: Cherifa Mansoura, PhD, Solution Architect, IBM

Cherifa Mansoura explains how disciplined agile delivery and agile requirements practices can scale in a DevOps environment for future maintenance and operations on existing products, and a business analyst can help ensure fruitful collaboration between Development and Operations teams.

Product: Rational Requirements Composer

Develop a CICS Java-based Axis2 web service

By: Amy M. Silberbauer, Executive IT Specialist, IBM

A meet-in-the-middle approach to complex service definitions in WSDL, for a complete, multiplatform service.

Product: Rational Application Developer, Rational Developer for System z

Automate investment analysis to predict product success or failure

By: Swathi Jain, User Assistance Team Lead, IBM and Veena K. Omprakash, Information Developer, IBM

Use Investment Analysis in Rational Focal Point to analyze likely outcomes for software and car manufacturing projects. Part 1 explains how to use the Investment Analysis feature in Rational Focal Point to build a simple financial model for a software project. Part 2 describes a more advanced model for similar car manufacturing projects. It reuses variables for another project and compares financial results.

Product: Rational Focal Point

Simplify build and deployment automation for complex projects

By: Li Luo, IBM Certified IT Specialist, IBM, José De Jesús, Senior Certified Architect, IBM, and Derrick Wong, Senior Consultant, IBM

Streamline steps, checkpoints, and exceptions by using a Java-based script that processes an external control file.

Product: Rational Build Forge

This week we are also highlighting the following items on our pages that you may find of interest.

Featured download - IBM Rational Requirements Composer

IBM Rational Requirements Composer provides the essential business support for teams of all sizes and complexity to define and capture business needs and manage all types of requirements across the project lifecycle. It fosters better business and development collaboration in a web-based requirements community involving a wide set of stakeholders including customers, analysts, developers, testers, etc. Rational Requirements Composer is an important part of IBM's Collaborative Lifecycle Management solution seamlessly integrated with Rational Team Concert and Rational Quality Manager. Through role-based access, project teams can shorten planning cycles and reduce rework cost by aligning development and test effort with requirements and business objectives.

Evaluate Rational Build Forge

Evaluate Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software

Enterprise modernization sandbox for System z

Original post by Patty_Orben can be found here.

New in Rational Downloads!

IBM developerWorks — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 20:36:00 GMT

We are indeed winding down into the next holiday week and the new year, but we still know you need to get the fixes and updates you need! To give you something to do in the hopefully slow week you're having, here's the latest and greatest downloads which have gone live from Rational Support since November 30th... and don't forget to check out the downloads tag to see the fixes you may have missed over the summer and early fall months:

Original post by AcdntlPoet found here.