Project Management Software: Rational Team Concert

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eric.shaw

Rational Team Concert (RTC) is a collaborative software development environment, it integrates work item tracking, source control management, continuous builds, iteration planning, and highly configurable process support to adapt to the way you want to work, enabling developers, architects, project managers, and project owners to work together effectively.

What can you do with Rational Team Concert?

Process awareness and customizability
Rational Team Concert can improve the productivity of your teams and the quality of the work they produce by allowing each team to teach the tool its best practices. Rational Team Concert uses this knowledge to automatically detect violations of your teams' process the moment they happen.

Team awareness
Rational Team Concert knows your project teams, their internal organization, and the artifacts they are working on. It greatly simplifies the access to team-related information or performing team-related operations. To mention only one example, in order to subscribe to a feed with all events specific to a team, just select the team in the user interface and select 'Subscribe to Team Events' from the context menu.

Work item tracking
Work items are the fundamental mechanism in Rational Team Concert to track and coordinate development tasks and workflows, all governed by your team's associated process. In addition work items are the hub for linkage between many Rational Team Concert artifacts (e.g. builds, work items, and change sets), as well as providing support for integration with other products. Work Item customization can be used to create new work item types or modify existing types in order to support the development process that your team follows.

Source control
The Source Control component of Rational Team Concert is a component-based version control system built on the Jazz platform. Its focus is on supporting geographically distributed teams and has strong support for parallel and agile development. It's built from the ground up to support a highly integrated collaborative development environment, integration with defect tracking, integration with builds, and process-centric automation.

Planning
The Planning component of Rational Team Concert provides tools to assist with the planning and execution of both agile and traditional projects. For agile projects it provides tools to create product, release and sprint backlogs for teams, to create individual plans for developers, and to track the progress during an iteration and to balance the work load of developers. For traditional projects Rational Team Concert supports schedule dependencies and constraints and a Gantt chart editor to create project plans. Regardless of the process used, plans are accessible to everyone on the team, and can change dynamically over the course of the project to reflect the team's position and direction.

Continuous builds
The Team Build component integrates the team's build system into Rational Team Concert, providing build awareness, control, and traceability to the team. Team members can track build progress, view build alerts and results, request builds, and trace builds to other artifacts like change sets and work items.

Transparency/project health
The Team Reports and Web Dashboards components of Rational Team Concert help you to keep tabs on the health of your project. Dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of work item queries, event feeds, reports, and other items that are critical to understanding your progress. Reports provide both real-time views and historical trends of builds, streams, work items, and other artifacts that your team works with.

Administration
The Jazz Team Server provides a web-based administrative UI for setup, configuration, and administration of the server. The server configuration can be modified and saved by authorized administrators through a browser, in many instances without requiring a restart. Administrators can view key statistics and see the requests currently being executed. The web UI also provides an easy-to-use server setup wizard that guides you through setting up common configuration settings, such as: database configuration, email notifications, user management, and LDAP integration.

IBM Enterprise Platforms Extensions
Rational Team Concert includes support for IBM enterprise level platforms such as System z and the various operating systems that can run on the IBM Power platform such as IBM i, AIX and Linux on Power. This functionality is unlocked via the Developer for IBM Enterprise Platforms Client Access License and includes such things as Dependency Based Build, Promotion, Deployment, and integration with the Rational Developer for System z and Rational Developer for Power Systems Software products.

Client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE
The Rational Team Concert Client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE is a team collaboration environment that brings the Jazz vision to .NET developers. With this integration, .NET developers can collaborate across teams, plan milestones and releases, track projects, manage source code and defects, automate builds all from within Microsoft Visual Studio IDE. This is a first class integration into Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, enabling the .NET developer to use the power of Jazz from within a familiar environment.

Built-in Integrations
Rational Team Concert also integrates with other products, such as Rational Quality Manager, Rational ClearQuest and Rational ClearCase. The integration with Rational Quality Manager and Rational ClearQuest is part of the Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management (C/ALM) effort which will also include Rational Requirements Composer.

Try it now!
You can download and try Rational Team Concert for 60 days, and it is completely FREE for up to 10 developers!
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