Rational Change

IBM® Rational® Change™, a Web-based, integrated, enterprise change management solution for request tracking and reporting, can help you increase quality by reducing the risk of unwanted or unauthorized changes being implemented. It can increase accountability through comprehensive change tracking and change control. It also helps unify software development, IT and other teams for effective decision making.

Rational Change assists your organization in streamlining and centralizing its ALM processes by managing changes to development, system and IT artifacts through a central change server. Geographically remote users use their Web browser to request changes or defects, to submit tasks, and to transition changes to new states. Once the change request or task is edited or moved to a new state, it is automatically synchronized in real-time to the correct remote databases, which helps eliminate errors and ensure that the correct work is performed in the right environment.

The central change management repository architecture offers change request management and problem tracking across distributed databases. Furthermore, it helps enforce formal traceability between the change requests and engineering tasks that drive your production environment.

Rational Change provides enterprise-wide change control through:

Lifecycle change management
Change management reporting
Change management for distributed teams
Best practices guidance
Integrated change and configuration management
Enterprise change process

Lifecycle change management

The lifecycle change management capability, powered by IBM® Rational® Change™, provides traceability and impact analysis from business change requests through to systems and software implementation tasks. For many organizations, acquiring IBM® Rational® DOORS®, a leading requirements management software product, is the first major step in process improvement. The next step is building on that success with lifecycle change management.

A holistic lifecycle change management (LCM) solution enhances communication, collaboration, and coordination by breaking down existing information silos and by tightly integrating all aspects of the systems and software development lifecycle. LCM improves information transfer between the different roles working across the lifecycle to enhance the quality of their work. Improved information flow between teams, facilitated by lifecycle change management, can reduce time to market, while process automation helps assure that processes are followed.

With Rational Change, you have complete control and flexibility in your lifecycle change management process. You can configure Rational Change to your organization’s processes. To reinforce organizational learning and strategic change management initiatives, Rational Change can follow the structure your organization uses to manage work.

The integration delivers full requirements change control for DOORS users and automates the process of requirements workflow management. It provides the flexibility needed to implement any process for managing, tracking, and reporting on all proposed changes against critical requirements, links, requirements structures, specifications, test plans, and other information maintained in DOORS.

You can clearly define and communicate requirements changes through an easy-to-use and configurable Web form. You can also create and browse relationships and format reports on changes, which helps reduce rework and can improve productivity and process control through the implementation of repeatable compliance processes such as CMMI or ITIL.

The requirements implementation interface brings complete roundtrip traceability from requirements to change requests to code with requirements-driven development. This interface can reduce scope creep, streamline development, and provide real-time visibility of the relationships between requirements and development activities. Activity reports run from the Rational DOORS interface provide visibility from requirements to change request to code, helping analysts to immediately view the impact of their changes to the entire system. Rational Change charts and reports will show development activities associated with requirements. And with IBM Rational Synergy™, an award-winning configuration management application, teams can have bottom-up traceability back to the change request and requirements.

Furthermore, to successfully drive enterprise initiatives like enterprise architecture, business process analysis, and SOA, you need real-time actionable information on your IT environment and a process for controlling changes to it. The IBM Rational System Architect® and Rational Change integration gives you the level of information granularity your enterprise architecture, business process analysis and SOA implementation need to succeed.

Change management reporting

To help you get the actionable information you need when you need it, IBM® Rational® Change™ provides powerful change management reporting capabilities, including traceability, trend analysis, metrics and graphs.

Whether you need an objective, high-level view into your development schedule or critical QA metrics, the change management reporting capabilities from Rational Change can help you monitor your change management data. You can improve process, reduce project delays, and meet time-to-market expectations through:

Historical trend analysis
Customizable reporting interfaces
Unique user home pages
Status indicators
Traceability and prioritization capabilities
Multiple charting and visualization options
Powerful querying abilities

Rational Change 5.2 provides elaborate CMMI level 3 and 4 change management reporting, including Phase Containment Effectiveness and Phase Screening Effectiveness. Phase effectiveness metrics quantify the organizations capability to find and fix defects closer to their origin, before the cost of rework becomes significant. By implementing strategies to improve these metrics, organizations can:

Reduce the number of released defects
Reduce cost of development
Avoid project delays

Change management for distributed teams

Distributed teams are common in systems and software development. Whether you develop across teams, divisions, locations, or time zones, to increase quality, you need seamless, real-time, consistent, repository-neutral change management availability and visibility. Your change management infrastructure has to provide a synchronized interface across heterogeneous code repositories from multiple vendors.

IBM® Rational® Change™ centralizes and helps coordinate changes across projects, products, components, and teams. With Rational Change, your organization can centralize its ALM process and consistently implement change management. Geographically remote users can perform any change request (CR), task-based submission, or transition from their Web browser.

Integrated change and configuration management

Integrated change management and configuration management can improve traceability, promote compliance, and reduce the cost of ownership.
IBM® Rational® Change™ is now integrated with leading configuration management solutions, including IBM Rational ClearCase and Mylyn Subversion, providing you with a single, centralized, integrated view of your development project.

Rational Change and Rational Synergy
IBM Rational Synergy™, a task-based, configuration management solution, can help you work faster and easier by improving collaboration and automating error-prone, manual configuration management processes. Through the Rational Synergy integration with Rational Change, you gain an integrated view of change management and configuration management data with a strong process engine and bi-directional workflow.

Rational Change and Rational ClearCase
The Rational Change and Rational ClearCase integration uses Rational Change to track and report changes to software assets in either base Rational ClearCase or Rational ClearCase UCM.

Rational Change and Mylyn Subversion
With the Rational Change and Mylyn Subversion integration, you can establish a consistent, integrated change management process for your Subversion configuration management environment through Rational Change through the Mylyn interface in Eclipse.

New integration releases include the Rational Change for ClearQuest Interface v 1.0.

Rational Change and Rational Team Concert
Rational Change integrates with Rational Team Concert (RTC) using a synchronizer. This allows synchronizing Change CRs with corresponding RTC Work Items. This synchronizer supports two main use cases:

Coexistence: To handle their change management processes, one team is using Rational Change and another team is using RTC. The two teams can collaborate and exchange defects and enhancements requests. If and when appropriate, the defects and enhancement requests are replicated to the repository of the other team and then maintained in sync. The teams can follow different change management process.
Complementary: Change is used to handle the change management process and RTC is used to provide the collaboration and agile planning capabilities. Once a Change CR needs to be included in an agile plan it is automatically replicated in the RTC repository, where the team leader can perform the agile planning. This scenario is typically used along with Synergy (and Synergy for RTC interface).

Best practices: Enterprise change process

With powerful customization capabilities, out-of-the-box change management best practices, and configurable workflow, IBM® Rational® Change™ promotes continuous process improvement for every organization. Rational Change comes with easy-to-use, best practice templates, processes, and configurable workflow that can help you increase productivity and improve quality.

Customizable user home pages for analysis and decision-making
Pre-defined roles and privileges as well as the ability to create new roles
Rational ECP, an out-of-the-box, change management solution for organizations of all types and sizes
Configurable workflow definitions that fit almost any organization
Change request forms that accelerate change implementation
The ability to include multiple attachments with each change request
A wide variety of ready-to-use, standard report formats
Report Builder for more advanced report creation
A powerful and flexible query mechanism that converts raw data into valuable information

The enterprise change process (ECP), a proven, enterprise-level, out-of-the-box solution, integrates disparate sources of change data into a consistent, reliable, open environment. The process, built on Rational Change, manages change, process improvements, quality initiatives, software enhancements, and defects across an organization.

The enterprise change process (ECP):

Provides an efficient and systematic enterprise-wide approach to change management
Scales to support change management needs for large or small enterprises
Helps provide compliance support for Sarbanes Oxley, CMMI, ISO 900x, ITIL among others
Delivers strategic QA capabilities
Provides requirements change management (RCR) and implementation request (IR) lifecycle capability through IBM® Rational® DOORS®

CMMI level 3 and 4 metrics support historical trend analysis, traceability, and prioritization to assist in critical decision-making. Integrations with application lifecycle management solutions establish traceability and surety. The Rational ECP provides the organization with a high-level overview of the changes to promote cooperation in the implementation of the change.

The ECP provides key functionality:

CMMI and SPICE compliance
Strategic QA support
- Project scheduling
- Effort estimation
- Causal analysis
- Process enforcement
- Duplicate management
Enhanced subscription features
State and transitions pictures
Effort progress bar
Page and section navigation features
Notification scripts
CMMI matrix report package (weighted matrix report)
Generate help with lifecycle visualization tool
Triggers

Integrated Product Change Management support

Integrated product change management with IBM® Rational® Change™ can help reduce the time needed to propagate changes throughout the entire design team. It can also help reduce turn-around time in design and defect resolution for advanced systems development. Rational Change helps provide full integration and traceability between requirements, activities and artifacts as part of the Rational solution offerings for product lifecycle management (PLM).

The need for product differentiation, as well as continued advances in electronics, is driving the increasing amount of software used in products. Problems in software however, create delays and cost overruns when manufacturers find errors during integration testing. Software changes require more time and resources for impact analysis and coordination, which can also lead to cost overruns, delays and quality problems.

In the automotive industry, in-vehicle electronics and software will increase by 35 to 40 percent by 2010. This complexity is leading to problems with quality, project delays and warranty costs. For an advanced device or system, changes to electrical components may require changes to the software or hardware. Customers need to coordinate changes across all domains and suppliers to deliver the right product. Rational Change can help drive that integration and co-ordination.