Visit us at SD West next week!

SD West 2008 is next week, in Santa Clara CA. IBM is a platinum sponsor of the event, and Scott Ambler, Practice Leader of Rational's Agile Development business will be speaking at the conference on Agile Model Driven Development.

He also has another interesting talk scheduled - here's the abstract:

Sci-Fi 2008
Speaker: Scott Ambler (Practice Leader Agile Development, IBM)
Date/Time: Monday (March 3, 2008) 7:00pm — 8:30pm

Presentation Abstract
The 2007-2008 television and movie season has provided us with a bonanza of science fiction: Jericho, Battlestar Galactica, Bionic Woman, Torchwood, Dr. Who, Stargate Atlantis, Iron Man, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Star Trek XI … Let's get together and share our opinions about what is actually worth watching. If you like we can even discuss why none of the other captains hold a candle to James T. Kirk.

In my opinion - worth watching: Torchwood and Doctor Who. If you don't get BBC America - sign up for it now!

More importantly, Ken will also be at the show, bravely staffing the booth. I'm sure he'll be blogging the event too!

Happy Anniversary to Rational!

It's been five years this week since Rational was acquired by IBM, so we're celebrating!

Of course, Rational has been around a lot longer than that - originally, we were founded way back in 1981, when we built Ada compilers and the hardware to run them on (you can go to wikipedia for a brief overview of Rational's history). We've come a long way since then! Today,

• IBM Rational delivers the industry's most complete, open, standards-based software development environment that helps developers deliver more reliable and precise, error-free code.
• IBM Rational software is the clear leader in Application Development and Project Portfolio Management (as ranked by Gartner analysts for six consecutive years).
• IBM Rational software is used by nine of the Fortune Top 10 companies, 45 of the Fortune Top 50 companies, and 87 out of the top 100 companies.
• Since the acquisition, more than 28,000 customers have purchased Rational software development solutions.
• IBM Rational has a tremendous impact on IBM's middleware portfolio. There are more than 2,000 Rational software developers within IBM focused on helping customers govern the business process of software and systems delivery.

So, let's celebrate! There's a new podcast you can listen to in which Grady Booch, Lee Nackman and Walker Royce chat about the last five years, talk about what it has meant for each company and for the software profession in general. Refinement of Rational's focus, the expansion of IBM's software paradigm, the further embracing of open source and open standards, the investment in growing technical talent, and the Jazz platform are all discussed.

For more information, check out the special anniversary page.

The Facts of RAD

MyEclipse has issued a press release that mentions RAD, and may cause some confusion. Tim Francis,WebSphere Tools & RAD Chief Architect, helps set the facts straight.

First of all, the transition from WSAD to RAD was purely a naming one. WSAD was delivered prior to IBM's acquisition of Rational, and RAD 6.0 was simply the next version of "WSAD" released under the Rational brand. RAD is entitled as a free upgrade to all active WSAD customers; there is no new cost - describing the transition from WSAD to RAD as complex or costly is either uninformed, or intentionally misleading.

The RAD value proposition is it's ability to improve the productivity of developers across the entire development life cycle. Some examples:

• Some other products provide simplistic support of UML, that requires iterative generation of java code, followed by import actions to keep the diagrams and code in sync. This round trip engineering approach was available back in Rational Rose, and is a long way from state of the art now. RAD provides much more than that - for example, we provide UML visualization, which allows you to view, edit, and update Java code using UML views. There's no separate model to get out of sync; you're editing the live code, but in UML.
• All modern IDEs include support for database interaction and definition, but RAD has the benefit of working with the DB2 developers to provide exceptional support (for all major databases); RAD includes graphical views of your data topology, a SQL scrapbook, impact analysis tools, the ability to write user-defined functions (UDFs) & stored procedures, and phenomenal support for embedded SQLJ.
• RAD has in-depth support for application profiling, analysis & testing; you can execute, monitor, and trace the flow and performance of your application, right out of the box.

For additional information, please see Tim’s complete response on the WEbSphere Community Blog.

Get up close and personal to Asset Manager

Rational Asset Manager is coming to a city near you.

You can now sign up to attend a developerWorks Live! briefing on Asset Reuse with RAM and Rational Software Architect. The first locations are:

• El Segundo, California on March 4th
• Jacksonville, Florida on March 12th
• New York city on March 19th.

So there's got to be a location within a short 1000 mile drive from you (assuming you're in the US).
We've got both coasts covered at least! Stay tuned for more locations to come.

So, what are we showing?

Well, asset reuse is an essential strategy for companies looking to create innovative solutions to solve complex software development problems. Searching for, identifying, updating, using, and deploying software assets can be a difficult challenge. An effective reuse strategy allows you to:

• Harvest existing artifacts and build and share assets to mitigate costs and productivity concerns for analysis, development, and testing.
• Coordinate and control assets and intellectual property, determining what is shared, versioned, and visible for others to use.
• Understand the relationships between and impact of assets, such as the relationship between development time assets and the relationship to infrastructure assets.
• Govern assets across communities -- for example, one community describing needs and another community realizing needs and submitting solutions to repository.
• Govern service development and publishing into a service registry.
• Track assets effectively across an organization.

The briefing provides a high level overview of RAM and RSA - tools that can help you address the components of a successful reuse strategy. Discussions and demos introduce key software asset management definitions, challenges and solutions, including strategies and tools that can be leveraged for a successful project.

Sign up now!

Scott Ambler on Agile Development

It's a little known fact that Rational's tools are equally at home in an agile development process as well as other, more "heavyweight" process structures.

Now, IBM's Scott Ambler has written an article in Dr. Dobb's January newsletter on Agile development. The article focuses on best practices for governing development projects and highlights the eighteen practices of the Lean Development Governance Framework created by Ambler and IBM's Per Kroll.

It's an interesting read. You can find the article here: http://www.ddj.com/architect/205920564

Super Bowl XLII and IBM Rational!

This week, IBM will demonstrate current and future portal technologies at the Media Center during Super Bowl Week. IBM has collaborated with the NFL and other partners to build the NFL's new media portal, NFLMedia.com.

According to the press release, amongst other technologies:

IBM Rational software development and testing tools were used throughout the software development lifecycle. The league builds custom portlets with IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software, which pull information from a variety of internal sources to provide fresh content as it becomes available.

How cool is that! Not only can you watch the Super Bowl, you can also check out all kinds of stats and stories through the portal, safe in the knowledge that Rational technology was used to make sure it doesn't go down at the wrong moment (hopefully).

Go Giants!