Integrating with software control management systems

IBM® Rational® Asset Manager complements existing software control management systems such as IBM Rational Team Concert™, IBM Rational ClearCase®, Unified Change Management, and CVS by adding ability to review, classify, archive, download, discuss, rate, and track reusable code assets.

This table illustrates how the Rational Asset Manager repository integrates with source control management systems.

Table 1. Differences between software control management and the asset repository
  Software Control Management (Team Concert, ClearCase, UCM, CVS) Rational Asset Manager repository
Primary roles Developers Business analysts, developers, architects, managers
Content level Files Assets – an asset can contain multiple related artifacts (files) and associated metadata
Change rate Frequent; work in progress Rare; hardened reusable components
Collaboration For artifact creation and parallel development For review and reuse of assets through discussion forums, emails, notification, RSS feeds
Taxonomy N/A Asset types and relationships; customers can add additional classification
Search File based Metadata based search, custom metadata attributes
Metrics N/A Track asset usage, feedback, and popularity
Review and approval Change management Review boards, customizable review process
Asset types, relationships and impact analysis None Recognize asset types and relationships. Help with end-to-end traceability including production deployment
Versioning Done at source files level Done at asset level; an asset can contain multiple files
Client access Eclipse Eclipse and Web

Code that has been published as an asset can be easily found and reused, thereby saving development time. The following example illustrates a scenario where an asset is defined, developed, built, reviewed, approved, and reused.

  1. A Software architect defines asset types, categorizations, review boards and review policies in Rational Asset Manager for asset governance and reuse.
  2. Developer A searches for assets to reuse (a Java archive file that provides logging in a web application), but does not find one.
  3. Developer A creates a logging asset by using the final baseline for the software control management-versioned artifacts.
  4. Developer A submits logging source asset to Rational Asset Manager. Asset is version 1, and has an asset type of "source."
  5. A Release engineer builds binary files from source files in logging source assets.
  6. A Release engineer creates new assets with binary files as artifacts and assigns a relationship to original source asset: source asset has "build for" relationship to binary asset, and binary asset has "built from" relationship to source asset.
  7. A Reviewer reviews and approves submitted asset (logging Java archive file). The asset is now searchable and reusable.
  8. Developer B searches and finds logging asset and includes it in his web application build using the Rational Asset Manager command-line API.
  9. Developer B updates his web application asset to have "includes" relationship to the logging Java archive file asset.

By reusing the code that Developer A has already written, Developer B saves time. By using the command-line API in Rational Asset Manager to build the logging Java archive file from the source asset, Developer B ensures that he will always be using the most recent version of the asset from Developer A.


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