Presenter Name to be added later
These are my thoughts and interpretation on this presentation. Don’t take this as from coming from IBM.
About Systems Development
Systems Development is different because there are many different high-level requirements
- Traceability/Auditablity
- Security
- Heterogeneity & Variance
Determining requirement priority is difficult
Traceability
- Why was this change made?
- Who made the change?
- Who approved it?
These are the examples given. In my opinion, this is not traceability, unless he’s talking about work items tied to requirements.
He shows a picture of the locate change set editor that is in Eclipse. He also shows a command line command.
Unlike many presenters, he goes straight to a live demo within 5 minutes. I dig this. He shows a story in RTC in Eclipse and looks for related change sets.
Maybe this is traceability but I prefer to refer to it as “forensics”. You’re looking through history to see what happened.
The speaker has assumed audience familiarity with RTC, which is good, but he’s showing new features without explaining that they are new. An audience member asked what version of RTC he was using.
You can drag and drop and see which release a change set was delivered to. The forensics capability is very nice, but it’s not clear how to report on it.
He also goes through a history view in RTC. New in RTC 4.0 is a pretty nice looking branch merge view that looks like a subway map. I like this.
Auditing
Can we create/define a package for an auditor? Report/Print out? What identifiers should we use. New in RTC 2012: command-line support for outputting bill of materials (I’m assuming this is software BOM, not a true parts list–this is RTC and not a PLM after all)
Identifiers are currently ugly, but there. The speaker acknowledge there’s more to do in this area.
You can actually output JSON output from the command line. Should make reporting easier. Eventually it may be a full-fledged API.
Security – Permissions
- More flexible ways of defining groups
- read access can be controlled
- NEW: Work Item Read Access Control using User Groups
- when you set permissions on a folder/file it has the same permissions throughout the repository. Interesting.
- if someone gives you a work item that includes something you can’t see, you’ll be told there’s something that can’t be seen. Again, interesting capability.
- Behavioral conditions can be defined (wildcards and the like)
- ACLs are not implemented in RTC 2012
- Data Spill – purge content from repository (complete delete from repository), non-reversable. You’ll see a record that something was deleted, but you won’t see what.
Heterogeneity
Not sure what is meant here.
- New: Windows Shell Integration – allow for lightweight SCM access as part of windows explorer
- New – MSCCI implementation, including support for integration with Rhapsody & Matlab
- New – Command line improvements; scriptability improvements, load rule support
RTC Shell
- Installs into Windows Explorer
- Pending Changes View
- Supports Windows 7 (64 & 32-bit) and XP
- For users who want to work with files and folders rather than change sets
- Simple opereations focused on files and folders
- Change sets are dealt with under the hood
RTC Shell Demo
Right-click context menu added to Windows. Simple. One thing is that it makes files hidden to Eclipse easy to add to ignore list (.project files and the like)
Seems to support what the web client supports. Not for admin users or setting up streams/builds. No surprise here. Change indicators on folders all the way to the project level folder. So you can know where a change is.
The RTC shell has some configuration options as well.
There is a tray icon, because that’s exactly what I need. More tray icons. (That’s not a jab at this shell in any way–more a jab at Windows.)
The Pending Changes view in Windows Explorer is almost identical to that used in RTC in Eclipse.
Using a command to open a work item in the Windows Shell will open the Web client.
I was never a ClearCase expert and ClearCase always confused me. This appears to be less confusing, but I understand RTC more than ClearCase. Still, I think that novice RTC users, or people who are new to source code control, could really benefit and warm up to RTC using this integration. I would definitely introduce RTC to people who aren’t familiar with eclipse using the Windows Shell.
There’s even a file diff viewer in the Windows RTC shell. Overall very nice, and it may be the best way to introduce new users to RTC.
MS-SCCI Control Panel
Options are shown and capabilities explained. I’m not too interested in this and have no knowledge. Integration with Rhapsody is shown on slides. This has the potential to support a lot of tools. In theory it should work with everything that implements MS-SCCI…in theory.
My Thoughts
In all fairness, this seems to be more of a product demo than about developing systems using RTC. I think this session, too, has been misnamed. Something I’ve noticed over the years at the Innovate conferences.