In my view IBM is struggling to align their products and practices with the advancement in the state of around software development process automation and collaborative development environment.

In this post I am going to focus on their release of Rational Method Composer 7.2 (RMC 7.2) and specifically point out why it is difficult for me to be convinced that they have done a root cause analysis of their previous failures (with RPW or earlier versions of RMC) or have recognized the direction where software process automation is headed.

When one thinks of a product release from IBM you would obviously expect a high level of maturity, sophistication and thought leadership. IBM is universally well regarded and respected for pushing concepts like SOA and software-as-service. However, when you look at how the Rational team has implemented the tooling around creating and tailoring processes, one wonders why that thought leadership is not being put in practice here. By choosing to keep RMC 7.2 as a thick client application the rational team seems to be stuck in a time warp. I simply cannot imagine a scenario where an enterprise is told that its process assets (which in many cases have the “secret sauce” of project success) is encased in a few laptops. So I was bit surprised that even while acknowledging this problem of scalability and multi-methodology blending, the rational team has chosen to resolve it by continuing to stick to the flawed design decision of using SCM to check-in/check-out process plug-ins. But now, to make matters even more difficult, process authors (often non-programmers), are required to use the eclipse IDE environment to derive some scalability benefits. This is simply unbelievable. First of all, this still does not solve the problem of scalability (see why). Secondly, SCM is a code repository specially built for handling code and not process assets. Finally there is little logic in making process authoring so complicated that it requires a team of consultants to even setup the multi-layer environment for process authoring. Moreover in this day and age when even videos are being edited online asking a process team to work in this client-only disconnected mode is simply irresponsible. I did notice that the rational team did take note of the overwhelming negative feedback on usability of RMC and I welcome that. As in IBM partner and while exhibiting at the RSDC in June 07 we heard lot of this negative feedback. As you read this please keep in mind that if you don’t have a business need for blended methodology processes (and RUP is all you need) or if you are fine with having one or two process authors, RMC does meet your needs. In fact we have a handful of customers who are in such a situation and would simply like to move their RUP process into a collaborative development environment such as VSTS using Content Bridge for VSTS. I hope to see some improvements in the UI with RMC 7.2 and will share what I find out.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 4:44 pm and is filed under General, Processes & Methodologies, Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.