Displaying items by tag: rational

Introduction    

When it comes to achieving the goals you set, it is important to have the best tools for the job. If you are already using IBM® Rational® DOORS® or are considering using it, there exists something, which can elevate the experience of using IBM® Rational® DOORS® and allow you to further enhance its already impressive capabilities - IBM® Rational® DOORS® Requirements Management Framework Add-on (also referred to as IRDRMFAO).

Challenges

In this article you will learn about what challenges you might encounter while attaining or managing the highest possible level of process maturity and how you can easily overcome them thanks to IRDMFAO.

• Firstly you can encounter problems when it comes to adopting requirements processes and their execution, especially when they are very complex. This can be a particularly significant issue should all stakeholders be involved in the process.
• When large quantities of requirements need to be analysed, it can be quite a lengthy and difficult process, which is why it needs to be as well optimized as possible. 
• Consistency can be another huge obstacle, since it’s difficult to maintain between multiple projects. However, it is crucial for success. 
• You may need to reach compliance with ISO 15288 and EIA632 standards. This can prove to be quite problematic
• You can get to a point where your process data model has to be updated on the projects that you are currently working on.

Option to solve it 

All of these challenges can add up to be quite a problem. Luckily, IBM® Rational® DOORS® Requirements Management Framework Add-on can help you with every single one. It is a solution, which has been created by industry experts for others in the industry, since it can be utilized by a variety of occupations, e.g. Software Engineers, Hardware Engineers, System Engineers and many more. IRDMFAO is in its essence a requirements management add-on, a solution, whose primary aim it is to help you achieve peak time optimization through getting your project on track with a practice, which is one of the very best ones possible with DOORS. To add to that, IRDMFAO is engineered to help you reach compliance with EIA632 and ISO 15288 standards and CMMI recommendations. IRDRMFAO adds utilities, a process and a data model to DOORS. However the most important thing is that all DOORS commands remain accessible for its users, because there is no interference with the DOORS layout.

Preferred solutions

IRDMFAO provides you with several features, which help overcome the aforementioned challenges, firstly, a RMF Generic Data Model (RMF is an acronym which describes information handled by the product or an action performed by the product). IRDMFAO comes up with a universal data model, however you are not limited to only using this one. As a matter of fact, you will be able to pick from an assortment of module types and relationships, which IRDMFAO provides.

In this example of a RMF model, every box serves as a module type (which serves the purpose of instantiating DOORS formal modules). There are also relationships (verifies, refers to…), which are provided by DOORS link modules and linksets.

In short, every action bolstered by the Requirements Management process handles particular elements of the data model and makes use of varying sorts of relationships and module types (also known as templates). For example, System requirements analysis makes use of UR,IDJ SR  modules (UR - Users Requirements; IDJ - Issues & Decisions and Justifications;           SR - System Requirements) and the “is justified by”, “satisfies”, “refers to” links.

IRDMFAO does not limit you in using a particular data model. It allows you to customize and adapt it for the needs of your project, since you can decide to only make use of some parts and then, if you see fit, continuously add more. This makes adopting requirements processes and their execution simpler and less time consuming, while also making updates to your data model more intuitive, improving efficiency and consistency in the process.

     Regarding the analysis of requirements, IRDMFAO has you covered by implementing specialized facilities that will aid you with management of particularly important requirements, whether they are considered hazardous (Critical requirements) or they are especially important to the project (Key requirements). There are also those that fit into both categories. IRDMFAO offers you “Risk analysis” - a specialized view using which you can assign significance and closely observe the especially problematic requirements. Another dedicated view - “Key requirements list” - allows you to do the same with the requirements you deem to be essential for your project. This will allow you to analyze and work with large volumes of requirements requiring analysis and save you precious time while also making the whole process more efficient.

  Last but not least, IRDMFAO provides its check project or module consistency tool to help you maintain peak consistency across your various projects and also modules. It is designed to serve as a precursor for a manual check, as it can notice errors and inconsistencies. You can either use it to monitor through collection of already defined rules or utilize the Integrity Check functionality, in which you can establish your own integrity rules.

Specialized solutions. Approaches, tips

 Now for a bit of an inside look, let’s inspect how IRDMFAO works. It enables you to instantaneously switch between two approaches that it uses. The first is the document approach, which you can utilize to view structured  information (like chapters, sections, paragraphs) or reach a state of universal and continuous visualisation. 

The second, database approach, allows you to define data using attributes and evaluate information, filter only the information that matters to you through filters and view traceability matrices.

To properly utilize the advantages that IRDMFAO offers, you will have to either create a new RMF project or transfer a DOORS project that already exists into a RMF project.

An important aspect of IRDMFAO is PUID (Project Unique Identifier). In its essence, it is used as a reference name of objects handled by the product (RMF objects), for example Requirements. There are two rules for this: firstly, two different objects should not have the same PUID values and secondly, the PUID should remain constant, meaning that even after change (editing the text or relocating the object) is done to it, the PUID should not change. 

You do not have to do this manually (although you can), since you can allow IRDMFAO to manage the values automatically. This is another way that IRDMFAO makes your life easier.  

Conclusion

All in all,  IBM® Rational® DOORS® Requirements Management Framework Add-on (IRDMFAO) is an integrated collection of tools, which is immediately usable and upholds the very best practices used in the industry, in particular regarding systems engineering activities. It can help you maximize your potential by facilitating acceleration in adoption and enactment of requirements processes. Additionally, it guarantees compliance with EIA632 and ISO 15288 standards and SEI-CMM-I recommendations, can improve consistency and drastically simplify analysing huge amounts of requirements (and much more!).

In Doors NG there are three types of templates - Project Area Template, Module Template, and Artifact Template. All of these templates can be managed on the project administration Templates page.

Config. Management enabled =  Manage Component Properties --> Templates --> Component or Artifact Templates (in the left sidebar)
Config. Management disabled= Manage Project Properties --> Templates --> Project or Artifact Templates (in the left sidebar)

Overview

EWM/JIRA Integration Adapter is multi-component software that provides on-fly synchronization of data between IBM Engineering Workflow Management and Atlassian JIRA systems. The solution is very flexible and can be adapted for almost any system with out-of-the-box or custom realizations.

The data exchange is based on the exchange by sync messages. The source system produces such messages as a result of user actions and the integrated system imports the messages making necessary data transformations and updates within. EWM/JIRA Integration Adapter is software that brings data exchange capabilities to the systems.

You can integrate systems in a one-to-many way. The simplest case when two systems can be synchronized. As well as a single system can be synchronized with several others when any data change will be processed for one or for a number of linked systems.

Features

Change Management

Version Control And Configuration Management

Planning

Automated building

Reports And Dashboards

Process

Collaboration

Community

IBM Rational Publishing Engine (RPE) is a tool used for automated generation of documents. It generates documents from other Rational products and applications from other vendors that use XML and REST interfaces. Published data is extracted from external systems called data sources.

IBM Rational Publishing Engine can extract the data from various data sources. The tool supports such external systems as Jazz CLM applications (IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation, IBM Rational Team Concert, IBM Rational Quality Manager), Rational DOORS classic, Rational Rhapsody, etc. The tool can work with many external tools that can be accessed through REST API. For example, Atlassian JIRA is among those tools.

IBM Rational Publishing Engine makes the data in reported systems transparent. The data is presented in a clear way giving comfortable and understandable presentation of it.

To use an external data source, you need only import a special XML description of available elements called data source schema. By the way, you can improve the schema creating additional elements there which is very useful if an external system can be customised and enhanced by user in some way. Imagine, if user created custom attributes in system and want add this data into final reports.

IBM Rational Publishing Engine supports various formats to generate documents. User can choose format of generated documents on start. It can be used such supported formats as HTML, Word, Excel, PDF, XSL-FO.

Designing a template is very easy. You can construct a template visually with a special blocks called elements located on Palette view. All you need is to find a needed element, drag it to template's layout and drop at the desired place.

One of the very interested elements on the palette is “JavaScript Code”. It adds a lot of flexibility into designing process. Essentially, a template will become a Javascript application that can do almost everything you want. You can define internal variables, save temporary data and use this for setting necessary behaviour during report generation.

Providing additional updates in properties of elements, you can define which data is extracted, how it's filtered and formatted. After a template is designed, you can use it for generation of required documents. Usually, you start to design a template for some specific data (for example, for module in IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation). But this is doesn't mean that your template can work with this data only. You can be confident that if you apply the same template for other data of similar kind (for example, for another module in IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation), it will build the documents in the same style and based on predefined rules but with another data.

Generally, there are two ways of designing a template. First, you can build template from scratch creating a blank layout and putting any reporting elements to it.
Another way is to enhance an existing template. For example, if you work in Jazz, take a published template and customise it on your own. Add custom headers and footers, styles, company's logo, change locations of elements, and so on.

You can build IBM Rational Publishing Engine templates for Jazz tools and use it within Jazz itself. After deploying a template in Jazz, you will see it in the list of available templates, and can run the document generation based on it.

IBM Rational Publishing Engine can build reports based on multiple data sources in one report. For example, you can build a template that will report about tests passed last week in IBM Rational Quality Manager, and provide lists of blocking defects registered in IBM Rational Team Concert for those tests. Later, you can add references to requirements from IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation which are covered by executed tests and included in some test plan.

To design a template in IBM Rational Publishing Engine, you have to purchase a license for this tool. But if you work in Jazz and use one of licenses there, you can use any templates designed by somebody and published in Jazz for generation of documents without any additional fees. Another word, Jazz license is enough to build documents in Jazz based on templates created in IBM Rational Publishing Engine.

Overview

IBM Rational Quality Manager is a collaborative, web-based, quality management solution that offers comprehensive test planning and test asset management from requirements to defects. The Jazz platform enables teams to seamlessly share information. It uses automation to speed project schedules and report on metrics for informed release decisions. It can also be purchased as part of the Collaborative Lifecycle Management solution—a set of seamlessly integrated tools: IBM Rational Team Concert, IBM Rational Quality Manager, and IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation.

Rational Quality Manager works with requirements in IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation to keep test cases in sync whenever requirements evolve. Rational Quality Manager also integrates with a wide range of test automation tools like IBM Rational Functional Tester, enabling you to run tests and collect results, all from a central location.

But when we will take a look at embedded software development, we will find big specifics because it's used on machines and devices that are not typically thought of as computers. Usually, this kind of software is specialized for the particular hardware that it runs on and has time and memory constraints. It can be exactly described that no or not all functions of such software are initiated/controlled via a human interface, but through machine-interfaces instead. We can point to such similar devices as cars, phones, modems, robots, toys, security systems, pacemakers, TV sets, digital watches, various medical devices, etc. This software can be very simple, such as lighting controls running on an 8-bit microcontroller with a few kilobytes of memory, or can become very sophisticated in solutions such as airplanes, missiles, and process control systems.

IBM Rational Quality Manager supports reliable and flexible integration with testing systems from National Instruments specially designed for use in embedded software development. National Instruments (NI) Test Integration Adapter for IBM Rational Quality Manager software enhances test engineer teams' efficiency by automating NI TestStand sequence execution and reporting from Rational Quality Manager.

Engineering departments create increasingly complex products, and as a result, automobiles, aircraft, medical devices, consumer electronics, and more depend on software driving the hardware components. IBM Rational software and National Instruments integrate development and test environments to help clients with their most important goals:

• Test the code of smart products, which might have hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code, for defects.
• Reduce the cost of code defects by identifying them earlier in the development process.
• Mitigate increasing product complexity by tackling quality challenges earlier in the development process.
• Improve efficiency by breaking down the tasks between engineering departments.

Combining Rational Quality Manager software and National Instruments (NI) TestStand provides comprehensive test case traceability, test case results management, and automated test scheduling and execution. Test results are made available to all teams so that applications can be validated at virtually every point along the development path, from simulation and prototyping, through deployment onto hardware, and integration into the end system. Both operational efficiency and test accuracy can be improved through the ability to reuse test components throughout multiple project phases and even on different projects.

A specially designed piece of software - the NI Test Integration Adapter for Rational Quality Manager software - provides integration between NI TestStand and Rational Quality Manager. This integration product includes the following main features and functions:

The requirement to test traceability: Test engineers can use the integration to link automated tests to test cases and to requirements. NI TestStand applications (and by extension all the code modules called) and parameter files on the test machine are linked to a Rational Quality Manager test case that provides traceability to other project aspects including requirements, overall quality plan, project plan, change-defect management system, and so on.

Test automation: From the web-based interface of Rational Quality Manager, test engineers can invoke the execution of the NI TestStand applications that are linked to the Rational Quality Manager test case. The execution status reported by the NI TestStand sequence is displayed in the Rational Quality Manager web interface as part of the test case execution results. Test engineers can then optionally create defects linked to the test case results to keep track of noncompliance detected by running the test.

Test case results management: Upon completion of the NI TestStand sequence, various outputs from the sequence are automatically published to Rational Quality Manager storage and an HTML report is linked to the Rational Quality Manager test case execution result page. The HTML report is created by this software product on the local machine and the details of the report content as well as what is stored in IBM JazzTM are configured by the user.

Videos

Excellent video about the integration of modeling, requirements, and testing software development areas into the whole software development process with solutions from IBM and National Instruments.

Simulink from The MathWorks, Inc. (an American privately held corporation that specializes in mathematical computing software) is graphical programming software for building models, simulations, and analyses for complex dynamical systems. It offers tight integration with the rest of the MATLAB environment. The tool can be very useful in automatic control and digital signal processing for multidomain simulation and Model-Based Design.

For completeness, the DNG public API's that are available are: 

• RDNG Reportable API - extracting read only information from RDNG generally for creating custom reports to be run from DNG or RPE. As well, it can be used in a lot of custom applications interacting with RDNG. Big advantage of this API is its simplicity and great performance if you need to work with big amounts of data. Sometimes it's called as RDNG Reportable REST API.

• OSLC RM V2 API - the open standard way to programmatically integrate with DOORS Next Generation, there is an elaborate workshop to get you started here OSLC Workshop article. These programs can be from any language that supports various HTTP methods of requests, e.g. Java, C# etc. Hence these are more flexible to run and can read and update DNG data, as part of a web server, or standalone, but have some limitations set by the current OSLC standard, for example module support. In release 6.0.5 extension have been added for modules. It's very powerful tool to work with RDNG data including capabilities of data modification but can be a little bit more complex in use than other ways.

• TRS 2.0 - the OSLC Tracked Resource Set open standard REST API to hook into the stream of low level changes done to resources in the DNG application (and other Jazz apps as well); read only.

• RM API - it's realized in client extension capability that is accessible from Rational DOORS Next Generation. This is Javascript extension framework that generally can be added as widgets which you can run from the dashboard, and can be used to view and edit DNG data. The widgets are developed in accordance to OpenSocial standard (based on Google Gadget framework). It's more tailored to DNG, so has better module support, but is limited to be run in a browser/javascript environment. It's very easy to make an automation of your work in this way. You can do a lot of interesting tricks with currently open Web page based on DOM/XML standards. You can add support of many popular libraries such as JQuery and so on. But this big simplicity results in some constraint in implementation. For example, you can easily access RDNG artifacts in current module or collection as well as access any selected artifacts but there are some difficulties if you need access artifacts in current view or currently available on the page. But use RM API together with other APIs described above can allow you do stunning things with RDNG.

Helpful Links

Ord.	Link	Comment
1	API Landing page	This is a landing page for the various API wiki pages that exist on the Jazz.net development wiki as well as a central collective page of the known APIs that are available for integrating programmatically with our CE/CLM products. It serves as a convenience for accessing API information about CE/CLM products and is not guaranteed to have up-to-the-minute information.
2	DOORS Next Generation Reportable API	The DOORS Next Generation server provides REST APIs for accessing information about requirement artifacts for reporting. You can access each API by using a standard web browser, IBM Rational Publishing Engine or a third party tool can can consume the DNG reporting services responses. This document covers reporting capabilities for DNG versions 6.0 and higher.
3	Using OSLC capabilities in the Requirements Management application	You can use Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration 2.0 (OSLC) capabilities in the Requirements Management (RM) application for the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM). This article includes examples of how to use those capabilities in an HTTP poster tool. These basic examples are described.
4	Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration Workshop	The workshop will help guide you to leverage the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standard interfaces for interoperating with Jazz-based products including RDNG. These labs will highlight key aspects by leveraging web browser access and programmatic access via Java client programs. The final lab will illustrate by an example how to write your own server using Java servlets. This lab is based on the OSLC-CM 2.0 and OSLC-RM 2.0 Specification. After you complete these labs, you will have a good foundation by which to leverage OSLC to implement an interoperability project.
5	OSLC Requirements Management Version 2.1. Part 1: Specification	This specification defines the OSLC Requirements Management domain, also known as OSLC RM. The specification supports key RESTful web service interfaces for software Requirements Management systems.
6	OSLC Requirements Management Version 2.1. Part 2: Vocabulary	This specification defines a vocabulary and resource shapes for the OSLC Requirements Management resources.
7	IBM DOORS Next Generation Server API Documentation (additions from v6.0)	Additions to standard OSLC API specially developed for use with RDNG. It takes into account some RDNG specifics that is out of scope of OSLC specification.
8	Getting Started with RDNG Extending Capabilities	Brief video giving a quick introduction into client extending capabilities.
9	Client extension API for the Requirements Management (RM) application	This document specifies the client extension API that forms part of the 6.0.5 release of the Requirements Management (RM) application. The version of this API is 1.1.
10	Client extension capability (all versions)	List of links to client extension APIs for all supported versions.
11	jQuery API	Useful API when developing RDNG client extensions.
12	Web APIs	When writing code for the Web with JavaScript, there are a great many APIs available. Below is a list of all the interfaces (that is, types of objects) that you may be able to use while developing your Web app or site.

 

Useful Links

https://www.facebook.com/oslcfest/

• OSLC Home: http://open-services.net
• OSLC on Twitter: http://twitter.com/oslcNews
• OSLC-CM Home: http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/CmHome
• Details on the RTC Implementation: https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/ResourceOrientedWorkItemAPIv2
• Carolyn Pampino on the RQM-RTC integration: http://jazz.net/blog/index.php/2009/08/26/sprint-alignment-for-developers-and-testers/
• Scaling Agile with C/ALM eBook: http://www.infoq.com/resource/articles/scaling-agile-with-calm/en/resources/InfoQ-IBM-ScalingAgilewithCALMeBook.zip

 DOORS Next Generation (v4.0.6): Adding an extension to your dashboards via URL 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3DxAneAPYQ 

Adding widgets to the widget catalog of IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation (V4.0.6) 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXl1YcDYjVg