IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials

Improve team productivity with Integrated Processes, Planning, and Collaboration using Team Concert Enterprise Edition

• Understand the core features and techniques of Rational Team Concert and Jazz platform through a real-world Book Manager Application
• Expand your knowledge of software development challenges and find out how Rational Team Concert solves your tech, team, and collaboration worries
• Complete overview and understanding of the Jazz Platform, Rational Team Concert, and other products built on the Jazz Platform
• Explore out-of-the-box projects with the 'Sandbox' feature of the Jazz Platform, even before you install Rational Team Concert
• A practical guide by a Rational Team Concert expert, with a simple, step-by-step approach to solve your team management and collaboration worries

       

Scrum is a concrete discipline of Agile software engineering. While Agile methodologies place emphasis on the principles and benefits of the iterative and incremental software development, Scrum constitutes a concrete set of management practices for highly flexible and productive teams.

Scrum is a popular form of Agile methodology practiced these days. In this article, the BookManager application uses the Scrum development template.

The central idea behind this section is to be aware of the process-oriented workflow in Rational Team Concert. We will describe this by using the Scrum process and see its integration into Rational Team Concert.

We will now see various aspects of how Scrum is supported and practiced through Rational Team Concert.

Project Area

Rational Team Concert starts the infusion of the process right at the time of the Project Area creation. This means that you can decide to choose a process from the available templates and attach it to the Project Area. From then on, the project and team has the ability to conform to the chosen process. If the project has more than one team, different teams may participate at different times and may follow a different process. In this situation, you can create Team Areas for different teams and add team members, roles, and customize process, if needed.

You could deploy the default available templates or create a templates from an existing one that suites your team and organizational needs. Creating a new template or initializing the project with available template is only the starting point. With the progress of the project, you can change the template to fit your team. In traditional software development, we see various tools that are bundled without seamless integration, and often the user needs to navigate from one tool to another to get a task done. Typically the process conformity is achieved with the help of various team meetings, spreadsheets, checklists, and others that are outside the tools or software development infrastructure. However, with Rational Team Concert, the process, team, and development tools are all integrated into one. As a team member, you don't have to worry about the process conformity or process knowledge as long as the administrator configures the process templates as shown in the following screenshot:

The ability of the tools to understand the project and process is one of the core concepts of Rational Team Concert, called Process aware tools.

Open the Project Area description of BookManager Project from the Team Organization view. The Project Area editor has several editor tabs that describe members, release plans, process configuration, work item categories, and others.

The Project Area's Overview tab contains the crucial information about the process. It has the name and short description about the process attached to this Project Area. In our case, you see Scrum as the selected process template. This tab also has the list of project members. Depending on the process selection, the process roles assigned to a user may change. Rational Team Concert has widely accepted user roles from the Scrum process such as:

• Scrum Master: A person responsible for the project.
• Product Owner: Person responsible for managing the product. He is also the person who will manage the product backlog
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• Stakeholder: Any party interested in the outcome of the product, such as internal management,a partner,or a customer.
• Team Member: A member of the cross-functional team who works for this project.

During the Project Area creation, the second step is to choose the process template. As an administrator, you need to make sure that the available templates are deployed. By default, the English (United States) locale is selected for the selected Scrum template. Depending on your country and language, you will adjust the locale. Be sure the project is initialized by ensuring that the default setting that says Automatically initialize the Project Area on Finish as specified in the process templateis selected, as shown in the next screenshot.

Project Area also defines the project time lines. When we create a Project Area with Scrum process template, by default Rational Team Concert creates a main release, Release 1, with two sprints namely Sprint 1 and Sprint 2. It also creates a product backlog. As an administrator, you will attach the process template to the project. The rest of the work is done by Rational Team Concert, giving you a ready-to- use system

Role definition

The Scrum process template comes with default user roles, namely Stakeholder, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Team Member. You can also add additional roles that are in your organization, as shown in the following screenshot:

To define a new role, go to the Process Configuration tab of the Project Area. In the Defined Roles section, you can add a new role by clicking on the Add New Role icon. You can define Cardinality to allow this role to be assigned to multiple members or to a single member, as shown in the following screenshot:

Every role defined in a process template needs to have permitted actions. This is configured by navigating to Project Configuration|Permissions in the Process Configuration tab. Select the Domain Specialist role and grant the necessary actions. In our case, we have given access to the Domain Specialist so that he is able to create and save dashboards and review the work items.

Configure the permissions and behavior of operations, that are associated with a team area from Team Configuration|Permissions. The options in this section can be further customized in Team Areas. These options can also be configured differently for a particular timeline, iteration, or type of iteration.

Optionally,you can enter a custom message explaining why permission is denied for a combination of a role and action.

You have seen that the Scrum template not only gives default roles and permissions in the context of Rational Team Concert, but also gives you the power to add and further customize the roles and permissions.