IBM Rational: The quality enhancer

BANGALORE, INDIA: With software development companies in a hurry to deliver products, project life cycles are decreasing and testing is becoming a critical factor in the success of the project as a whole. Today, development organisations face several significant challenges, which include release cycles, assurance of quality of code, and managing the costs and risks, with ever-shortening projects.

Jamie Thomas, vice president, product development and customer support, Rational Software IBM, says, “The ability to have the right information by the organization to make it risk appropriate, which is important and it is somehow lacking, to overcome code complexity, to keep pace with rapid changes and work within budgetary constraints a few of the challenges.” 

In order to overcome these constraints IBM has added capabilities in its product like Quality Manager. “IBM Rational Quality Manager offers a portfolio of tools, which advocate a collaborative process, powered by automation to govern software delivery. This portfolio enables teams to work together, to deliver applications that are on time, on budget and meet their business objectives,” she added.  

IBM's Quality Assurance management

The awareness and traction around quality assurance, testing, and configuration management are some of the biggest factors, which are driving the growth of application development and the quality lifecycle tools market. 

IBM Quality Management throughout the lifecycle is a continuous, comprehensive, and collaborative quality management that reduces costs and improves credibility. It ensures business flexibility with functional and performance testing of business services to help ensure compliance and improve customer satisfaction. Quality Management guarantees organizational efficiencies by automating workflows across business processes by streamlining and eliminating redundancies to improve return on investment (ROI).

With the continuous and integrated lifecycle approach to quality, it helps to enhance the complexities of each business process to leverage the artifacts of other processes for targeted and streamlined workflows, measurable and auditable requirement trails, and process validation. The result is a higher cost efficiency, time-to-value and improved quality metrics for business-critical projects.

“To enhance quality in the collaborative approach, we need to cater lots of knowledge that we have shared in collaborative technology today. For Example, collaborative approach with the help of instant messaging will help managers to help geographically distributed software delivery teams work together in an open, real-time and transparent manner to more effectively deliver and source software solutions,” said  Jamie.

IBM Rational product 

According to a report by Evans Data Corporation, the number of software developers in India is predicted to grow at about 23 percent per year over the next few years growing from 1.8mn in 2008 to 2.7mn in 2010.

The company's Indian product development centre develops around 10 per cent of IBM Rational software tools. A team of 30 members at the IBM India software lab takes care of the central technology integration and worldwide support.

“A Rational product will help organizations create business value by improving their software development capability. It will create a platform, which integrates software engineering best practices, tools, and services. With it, organizations thrive now, in an on demand world by being more responsive, resilient, and focused. Rational products will also help the organization to bring technology and software together to help the team in the organization to collaborate more effectively on software development and delivery projects,” said Jamie.

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IBM's Jazz collaborative technology

The new products use IBM's Jazz collaborative technology to help geographically distributed software delivery teams work together in an open, real-time and transparent manner to more effectively deliver and source software solutions.

Jamie said: “Jazz is IBM Rational’s new technology platform for collaborative software delivery. Uniquely attuned to global and distributed teams, the Jazz platform is designed to transform how people work together to build software—making software delivery more collaborative, productive and transparent. Jazz technology is an extensible framework that dynamically integrates and synchronizes people, processes and assets associated with software development projects.”

IBM’s focus is to provide a wide variety of platform for its products with innovative technology and solutions. Jazz supports both Eclipse based development products and Jazz.net that has a unique innovative approach. IBM’s lifecycle support programming is very heterogeneous and focuses on rational products at a much larger platform to avail all the requirements of the customers. 

“We have received positive feedbacks with reference to our Jazz community from other open source communities and what we are really doing is focusing on open source community to create commercial products. With the help of Jazz.net, which is an open, commercial community, it helps the open source community to design and collaborate on the development of Jazz-based technology,” concluded  Jamie.