IBM Rational Jazz-based tools (DOORS Next Generation, Quality Manager, Team Concert and Design Manager) from version 6.0 onwards incorporate extensive support for configuration management. To support these capabilities, we provide a comprehensive set of practices, including processes, methods and guidance, designed to meet the needs of organizations and teams adopting configuration management, particularly using it to support strategic reuse and product line engineering. This evaluation guide helps you to understand the philosophy and practices. Note that these capabilities are provided for all development artifacts, not just for software. Software Configuration Management is already available for source code through Team Concert.

Solution Vision

Support for strategic reuse is built on a solid foundation – The IBM Rational Systems and Software Engineering Solution. The following figure provides a high-level overview of the solution.

What's in the strategic reuse practices

The strategic reuse practices have been designed to identify and define differences that arise from the use of strategic reuse as compared to where it is not used. This provides users with the ability to understand where strategic reuse touches existing processes, without enforcing a specific overall process.

Objectives of this evaluation guide

The objectives of this evaluation guide are to provide users with the opportunity to understand the concepts behind strategic reuse and where they need to think about its impact on existing practices.

How to evaluate the practices

This method website guides you through your evaluation. To the left you will see the navigation window that contains three "drawers":

• Strategic Reuse Adoption Framework: Provides a guide for how to adopt strategic reuse and configuration management practices
• Strategic Reuse: Provides a navigation tree to view process and method content related to strategic reuse and configuration management
• Evaluation Guidance: Provides a guide to evaluating the method content and enabling tool support for strategic reuse.

To continue your evaluation start in the “Evaluation Guidance” branch by reviewing the basic concepts and the tool installation and configuration guidance under the "Getting Started with the Evaluation" node on the left.

Once you complete the tool installation and configuration you can use the Change Management Evaluation, Define Product Variant Evaluation and the Process Guidance Evaluation scenarios under the Evaluation Scenarios node to walk through the key aspects of the solution. Of course you should feel free to explore other areas of the method website.

In both the evaluation guidance and practices, we show screenshots. These are generally to be taken as examples and may not reflect exactly what you see.

Note that the “Evaluation Guidance” branch is intended introduce the practices; it does not include full detail for the practices themselves. These are in the “Strategic Reuse” branch.