IBM replacing Rational Process Workbench

19.10.2005
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Paul Krill ist Redakteur unserer US-Schwesterpublikation InfoWorld.

In an upgrade to its software development arsenal, IBM will replace the Rational Process Workbench with software and best practices focused on SOA, collaboration, and reduction of software project failures.

Under IBM"s plan to be announced on Wednesday, the RUP (Rational Unified Process) product and Rational Process Workbench are to be replaced by the IBM Rational Method Composer. The new offering incorporates the RUP best practices platform.

Rational Method Composer extends RUP by adding best practices that leverage SOA, portfolio management, and collaborative distributed development, the company said. Intended as an enterprise-level solution, Rational Method Composer will help IT organizations overcome the complexity of software and better manage a large volume of concurrent processes, according to IBM.

The product is based on the Eclipse open source tooling platform.

"The key thing is to broaden the scope with RUP," said Per Kroll, manager of methods at IBM Rational. "We have primarily focused on the needs of individual projects and with Rational Method Composer, we"re focusing on the needs of entire organizations."

Shipping by the end of the year, the product extends beyond RUP"s focus on development by automating the flow of project data between business and IT teams, IBM said. This helps organizations more effectively manage projects. Templates are featured for project plans; new best practices help teams identify project goals and determine resources needed.

Information derived from Rational Method Composer can be sent to the IBM Rational Portfolio Manager tool for managing project resources and schedules. Time needed to customize best practices is reduced from weeks and days to hours and minutes, according to IBM.

Also featured in Rational Method Composer are process guidance wizards and tools to automate the capture of best practices. Rational Summit Ascendant best practices also are included.

Rational Method Composer drew a rave review from one analyst.

"First, it"s a huge improvement from the existing RUP toolset, so it"s just [much] better in terms of usability [and] authoring. It"s a replacement for the current toolset," said analyst Liz Barnett, vice president of application development at Forrester Research.

"The biggest change is that it"s an amazingly productive authoring environment compared to what"s there today," Barnett said.

IBM last week said it would contribute 15 percent of Rational Unified Process to Eclipse. But Rational Method Composer has features not included in that contribution, such as guidance on portfolio management and distributed development. "It"s a huge amount of content that we have in the Rational Method Composer that we"re not planning to contribute to Eclipse," Kroll said.

Rational Method Composer will be priced at US$395 per user.