IBM Rational App Dev Tools Get An UpgradeIBM Rational App Dev Tools Get An Upgrade

IBM upgraded its Rational Software line of development tools last week, adding management capabilities so that development becomes just another auditable business workflow process, one that can be kept in line with compliance requirements.

A key enhancement was adding testing management and test results to the other steps of software development. A testing team can document and share with other members of the development process what code has been tested, what the configurations that underwent testing were, and what the results were.

IBM told its Rational user group meeting last week that ClearQuest has been enhanced with BuildForge's management capabilities. The ClearQuest repository will store results of bug tracking, change orders, requirements, and early versions of a software application. It also will capture and store results of tests on an app's assemblies and compiles.

The result has been an improved understanding of software performance during and after development, says Siemens principal engineer Rainer Ersch. "The enhanced traceability that IBM Rational now produces helps Siemens' medical group adhere to Federal Drug Administration compliance requirements. Without this functionality, our products would not meet FDA approval and could not go to market," Ersch says via E-mail.

Ersch is referring to Rational ClearQuest version 7's ability to capture permanent electronic signatures as managers sign off on code submissions, test results, and deployment configurations. "For my company, e-signatures and deployment tracking are an absolute must," he says.

IBM is capitalizing on its acquisition last month of BuildForge, a supplier of a software build-and-release management system. IBM upgraded 12 tools in its Rational suite, now dubbed Rational Team Products 7, with BuildForge cross-team capabilities.

But the biggest change is to its development workflow tool, ClearQuest. It's as if the concepts of workflow management, accountability, and risk management suddenly are being applied to software development--a process that sometimes has been viewed as so disjointed as to be barely manageable.

Siemens spent half its $6.7 billion R&D budget last year on software, employing 30,000 software engineers. "An important goal is to extend our Change and Defect Management System to be a complete workflow system, where all information regarding our projects comes together," Ersch says, adding that the shared ClearQuest repository makes it simpler to perform monitoring, reporting, and traceability.