Written by Raj
ClearCase
Rational Suite editions are sets of tools customized for every member of your team. Each Suite edition contains the tools from the Rational Suite Team Unifying Platform. The Team Unifying Platform is a common set of tools that focus on helping your team perform more effectively. Each Rational Suite edition also contains tools selected for a specific practitioner on your development team.
What Is Rational Suite?
Rational Suite editions are sets of tools customized for every member of your team. Each Suite edition contains the tools from the Rational Suite Team Unifying Platform. The Team Unifying Platform is a common set of tools that focus on helping your team perform more effectively. Each Rational Suite edition also contains tools selected for a specific practitioner on your development team.
Some features of Rational Suite:
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Unifies cross-functional teams in a Windows environment through key product integrations and workflow
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Includes the IBM Rational® Team Unifying Platform to manage development across the lifecycle.
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Accelerates development through visual modeling, code-generation and reverse engineering capabilities
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Finds and eliminates runtime errors, memory leaks and performance issues.
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Includes best practices, market leading tools, and configurable process.
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Provides all the tools your team needs in one box.
- Offers access to product-specific discussion forums, white papers, and re-usable assets as a member of the IBM Rational online development community.
Why we need Rational Suite?
Think about your last software project. Was it delivered on time? Was it released within its budget? Was communication between team members clear and timely? Did your team maintain consistency throughout the project while it defined requirements, developed designs, and wrote code? Was your build process repeatable? Did your software meet requirements, satisfy users, and perform reliably?
Many project teams experience problems in these areas. In fact, many software projects finish late (or not at all), and the results often dont match the requirements.
Many projects uncover serious design flaws late in the process. Defects are often found after the software ships, instead of during development.
How can you make your next project more successful?
Rational helps you increase your productivity and effectiveness by focusing on these software development best practices:
Typical Software Development Process:
Develop Software Iteratively
Iterative development means analyzing, designing, and implementing incremental subsets of the system over the project lifecycle. The project team plans, develops, and tests an identified subset of system functionality for each iteration. The team develops the next increment, integrates it with the first iteration, and so on. Each iteration results in either an internal or external release and moves you closer to the goal of delivering a product that meets its requirements.
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Developing iteratively helps you:
- Make your project more predictable.
- Collect feedback early.
- Identify and eliminate risks early in the project.
- Test continuously throughout the project lifecycle.
Manage Requirements
A requirement is one criterion for a projects success. Your project requirements answer questions like What do customers want? and What new features must we absolutely ship in the next version? Most software development teams work with requirements. On smaller, less formal projects, requirements might be kept in text files or e-mail messages. Other projects can use more formal ways of recording and maintaining requirements.
Managing requirements means that you understand how changing requirements affect your project and you can effectively communicate requirements to all team members and to stakeholders. Effective requirements management helps your organization ensure that its products meet their stated goals.
Use Component-Based Architectures
Software architecture is the fundamental framework on which you construct a
software project. When you define an architecture, you design a systems structural elements and their behavior, and you decide how these elements fit into progressively larger subsystems.
A component is a nontrivial, independent, and replaceable part of a system that combines data and functions to fulfill a clear purpose. You can build components from scratch, reuse components you previously built, or even purchase components from other companies.
Designing a component-based architecture helps you reduce the size and complexity of your application and enhance maintainability and extensibility so your systems are more robust and resilient.
Model Software Visually
Visual modeling helps you manage software design complexity. At its simplest level, visual modeling means creating a graphical blueprint of your systems architecture.
Visual models can also help you detect inconsistencies between requirements,
designs, and implementations. They help you evaluate your systems architecture, ensuring sound design.Visual models also improve communication across your entire team because they concisely convey a lot of information. With Rational tools, you can create visual models in the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the industry-standard language for visualizing and documenting software systems.
Continuously Verify Quality
Verifying product quality means that you perform activities such as testing to ensure quality of the code, documentation, and any product-related training. Testing includes verifying that the system delivers required functionality, reliability, and the ability to perform under load. It also means that there are effective user support materials.
An important benefit of iterative development is that you can begin testing early in the development process. Testing every iteration helps you discover problems early and expose inconsistencies between requirements, designs, and implementations.
Manage Change
It is important to manage change in a trackable, repeatable, and predictable way.
Change management includes facilitating parallel development, tracking and
handling enhancement and change requests, defining repeatable development
processes, and reliably reproducing software builds.
As change propagates throughout a project, clearly defined and repeatable change process guidelines help facilitate clear communication about progress. Making team members aware of change helps you control risks associated with unmanaged change.
How Rational Test Suit Can Help me to achieve te above goals?
To put these software development principles to work, Rational Software offers Rational Suite, a family of market-leading software development tools supported by the Rational Unified Process. These tools help you throughout the project lifecycle.
Rational Suite packages the tools and the process into several editions, each of which is customized for specific practitioners on your development team, including analysts, developers, and testers.
Alone, these tools have helped organizations around the world successfully create software. Integrated into Rational Suite, they:
- Unify your team by enhancing communication and providing common tools.
- Optimize individual productivity with market-leading development tools packaged in Suite editions that are customized for the major roles on your team.
- Simplify adoption by providing a comprehensive set of integrated tools that deliver simplified installation, licensing, and user support plans.
The following tools are included in this suite:
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IBM Rational PurifyPlus for Windows
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IBM Rational Rose Enterprise
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IBM Rational Robot
IBM Rational Team Unifying Platform
IBM Rational® Team Unifying Platform is an integrated suite of infrastructure tools and process including: IBM Rational® RequisitePro
IBM Rational® ProjectConsole
IBM Rational® ClearCase LT
IBM Rational® ClearQuest®
IBM Rational® TestManager
IBM Rational® SoDA®
IBM Rational® Method Composer
A core part of every Rational Suite®, Rational Team Unifying Platform unifies your team by providing common access to development assets, communication alerts and workflow processes. Rational ProjectConsole provides managers and team members with access to complete project information through a single Web site.
Rational® PurifyPlus for Windows® is an automated runtime analysis tools for Windows-based application performance.
Automated runtime analysis tools to improve Windows-based application reliability and performance. Designed for Java, Visual C/C++, C#, VB.NET, and Visual Basic applications.
Provides a complete set of automated runtime analysis tools
Improves application Windows-based application reliability and performance
Is designed for Java, Visual C/C++, C#, VB.NET and Visual Basic applications
Operating systems supported: Windows
IBM® Rational® Rose® Enterprise provides a common modeling language for enabling faster creation of quality software. Some of the features are listed below:
- Jump-start your Ada, ANSI C++, C++, CORBA, Java, J2EE, Visual C++® and Visual Basic® applications with code generated from visual models.
- Includes Unified Modeling Language (UML) support and is one of the most comprehensive products in the Rational Rose family
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Supports Analysis, ANSI C++, Rose J and Visual C++ patterns, Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0, and forward and/or reverse engineering for some of the most common Java 1.5 constructs
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Offers code quality analysis abilities and code generation, with configurable model-to-code synchronization capabilities, as well as more granular management and use of models with the separately controllable model components feature
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Integrates with other IBM Rational lifecycle development tools as well as any SCC-compliant version control system, including IBM Rational ClearCase®
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Includes a Web Modeling Add-In, which provides visualization, modeling and tools for developing Web applications
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Provides UML modeling for database designs, with the ability to represent the integration of data and application requirements through logical and physical designs
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Creates XML document type definitions (DTD) for use in your application
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Operating systems supported: HP Unix, Linux, Windows
Rational Robot is a test automation tool for functional testing of client/server applications. Some features of the Rational Robot is listed below:
- Test automation tool for QA teams for testing client/server applications. Enables defect detection, includes test cases and test management, supports multiple UI technologies.
- Provides a general-purpose test automation tool for QA teams for functional testing of client/server applications
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Lowers learning curve for testers discovering the value of test automation processes
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Enables test-automation engineers to detect defects by extending test scripts and to define test cases
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Provides test cases for common objects and specialized test cases to development environment objects
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Includes built-in test management, integrates with IBM Rational Unified Process tools
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Aids in defect tracking, change management and requirements traceability
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Supports multiple UI technologies
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Operating systems supported: Windows
Each of the above area will be discussed in details in the subsequent articles.
