Integration workflow

Rational® Engineering Lifecycle Manager integrates with Rational Team Concert™. The integration enables teams to work in the context of the artifacts (products, streams, and component baselines) that they are developing.

You can associate Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager products and Rational Team Concert streams and component baselines. Rational Team Concert streams are organized as a flat list of component baselines, and cannot represent the underlying component hierarchy of real-world projects. Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager provides a way to view and manage a hierarchical structure.

The initial setup describes the first step, how to connect the streams and component baselines in Rational Team Concert to the products in Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager. In all workflows, at least one team member must manage the stream for your team. This team member might be a development lead or team manager. Stream managers decide which of the following scenarios their teams need, and then follow the workflow to understand the steps to use it.

Streams and component baselines are not stored in the index. Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager and Rational Team Concert exchange component baselines with each other directly, without using the index. For the exchange to occur, your administrator must establish a friend relationship between the servers. See Establishing cross-server communication to enable Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager OSLC preview. Your administrator can manually set all of the Rational Team Concert servers that you want to connect to. Set servers on the Application Administration screen > Settings page > Integrations > Rational Team Concert.

Initial setup

Before you can exchange component baselines between tools, you must set up the streams and component baselines that your team needs to complete product development. Although your team might include many projects as part of the component baselines, projects are not part of the integration. Projects are not part of the setup.

  1. In Rational Team Concert, set up a stream and add component baselines to it.

    You can add as many components to the stream as your team needs for their project. As the project moves through iterations, you might add or remove more component baselines. In other words, the stream you are creating might or might not be the final one, which is alright. The integration is flexible enough to allow modifications during any point in development.

    See Creating streams. To learn more about streams, see, Streams and components.

  2. If you want to load only the component baselines that you need into a Rational Team Concert workspace, see Load rules.
  3. The top-level of a product tree in Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager must be a product configuration. You can create child products to support and organize your streams and component baselines.
  4. In Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager, connect a product to a Rational Team Concert stream.

    The stream manager can then receive or send component baselines between the tools.

    You can connect a stream to only one product.

    See Connecting products, streams, and component baselines.

  5. In Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager, receive component baselines from Rational Team Concert.

    Both receiving and sending component baselines are initiated from Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager. You can receive and send component baselines as often as needed. For example, your team requires a new component part way through development. You add it to the stream, and receive it in Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager immediately or whenever you have time.

    See Receiving and sending component baselines.

  6. Restructure the component baselines that were received from Rational Team Concert.

    Use products to organize component baselines in the product tree in a way that makes sense for your project. To organize component baselines, you can move them so that they are nested, add links to artifacts and URLs that affect the component baseline, and add custom properties. You can also reuse component baselines by creating child products to gather the component baselines that you want to reuse.

  7. Send component baselines to Rational Team Concert.

    This action updates the list of component baselines in the Rational Team Concert stream with the changes you made in step 5. If you moved products, but did not remove or add products that are connected to component baselines, you do not need to send components to Rational Team Concert.

Day-to-day use of the integration

The following workflows describe how to get updates from Rational Team Concert streams, reuse component baselines, and branch a product and then share it. Each workflow assumes that you completed the Initial setup. (Your team might not use the load rules in step 2.)

Load rules

Load rules define a subset of a product hierarchy to load into a Rational Team Concert workspace. In Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager, you can export a load rules file. In Rational Team Concert, after you add component baselines to your repository workspace, you can use load rules to load only the component baselines you want to work on.

See Generating load rules for component baselines.

For details about load rules, see Loading or unloading repository workspaces

Source code development

Developers work in Rational Team Concert workspaces. If team members need a component added to or removed from the stream, they typically ask the stream manager, a development lead, or team manager to do it. The stream manager fulfills the request. The developers accept the changes that are made to the stream, and the team members continue with their work, as in the following workflow.

  1. In Rational Team Concert, create a workspace, which is the development environment where you work on source code.

    See Creating new repository workspaces from streams.

  2. Change the source code, check in the files, and deliver the change set.

    See Checking in unresolved changes and Delivering change sets.

  3. If your team requested changes to component baselines, the changes are in the Pending Changes view.

    See Loading or unloading repository workspaces.

  4. If the stream contains more component baselines than you need, use a Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager Load rules file to load only the component baselines that you need into your Rational Team Concert workspace.

Feedback