It has taken me over a week to fully recover from the conference. I usually bounce back much quicker but I had a slew of work waiting for me once IBM Innovate 2012 ended.

I wanted to post my thoughts on the conference because there doesn’t seem to be as much information about the event itself from attendees. Are you an Apple Developer? There are plenty of Google searches that will lead you to what the WWDC is like. Into videogames? You know what to expect from E3. Go to Innovate? Well, good luck.

And that is where I am coming from. In my past life I went to E3 every year. I’ve been to a single MacWorld event. And I already mentioned WWDC. Since WWDC, E3, and Innovate are all so close to each other time wise, when I’m at Innovate I feel like I’m going to the least fun of the three conferences.

I’ve gone to the IBM Rational conference every year since 2009, and I went to just one Telelogic conference in 2007. So while I’m not exactly a veteran, I’m not a newbie either, and I’ve seen enough to compare them to each other and contrast to Telelogic’s conference.

Innovate 2012 In Review

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.

Presenter: Dr. Dejan Glozic, Architect, Jazz Foundation Web UI

What follows is my synopsis and interpretation of this presentation given at IBM Rational Innovate 2012 in Orlando, FL.

Overview

• Dashboards are part of the Jazz Application Frameworks, available to all Jazz Products
• Highly configurable
• Execute many queries at once
• Tracking status
• Stored in Jazz repository

This is listed as an Intermediate level presentation, so I don’t think that most in this audience need to know what a Jazz dashboard is. But then again, I just typed up most of this slide so what do I know.

Glozic goes over the types of dashboards. Seems to be just a regurgitation of the first slide. There are team dashboards, project dashboards, and user dashboards. Again, this is kind of 101 info for any Jazz application. Beginner stuff so far. 

The only thing he says that might be considered intermediate is that if you run many dashboards and tabs that performance will be affected. Common sense but not every user may expect that.

The Fun Part

This is what Dr. Glozic considers to be fun.

Resizing columns

You can resize columns. Seems to be a new feature.

Trim and background color

Setting the background color and trip (header background) makes things more legible and pleasing to the eye. If you go to settings, you can change the Trim and choose to show background color. He says it seems trivial, and he’s right. It does seem that way, but it really is a good little tip. My guess is most people don’t customize the appearance.

Unfortunately, they use pre-determined colors. They should give users full control here I think.

Hide the header

You can hide the header and it will “group” information with what’s around it. Give page a different look.

Duplicate widgets

This is pretty self-explanatory. Duplicate, then change what you need.

Copy/Paste

You can copy and paste widgets between pages or dashboards. The browser must support HTML5 local storage. You can copy and paste within the same url (I am not sure if he means domain name or jazz server by this)

You can copy and paste entire tabs.

Headline Widget

Recommends to use as a column description. Use with graphics and use without trim. I think this is a good tip.

Import/Export tricks

Embedding an external page

Just point to another website on a widget in its own tab. Seems obvious. May or may not be.

The key is finding the right URL. There is a way to put in a google calendar URL into a widget into Jazz, full page. I like this.

• You can embed pretty much anything on the web
• It has to serve content as HTML from a URL
• If it provides an HTML snippet where there is an iframe, copy and paste the iframe code

New in 4.0

Export to HTML

Any viewlet can be exported as an HTML snippet from the trim menu. This lets you access Jazz data from external sites/tools. However, you’ll need to be authenticated into Jazz if not using a SSO with Jazz server. This is very nice.

OpenSocial gadget adapter

Makes dashboard viewlets act as OpenSocial gadgets in external containers (whatever that means). The picture shows Jazz widgets added to iGoogle.
 
Glozic also show a JIRA dashboard as an OpenSocial gadget container. Caveat is that OAuth has to be configured between JIRA and Jazz.

Tricks with Widgets

Glozic says he was looking for non-obvious tricks. Let’s find out if he succeeded.

Custom color for the work items category

New in 4.0 – you can set the color as custom in the settings of a widget. There’s a photoshop-style color picker.

New property and icons in work items

Basically you can create icons for different types of work items or work item properties. So say, a high severity work item can have a different icon than a low priority one. So you’ll get two icons next to the link for an item instead of one.

Merging categories in bar charts

You can group items that you don’t care about graphing as “other”…so if you are graphing 6 categories, you could graph categories 1 and 2 as separate bars, and define “Other” as all other categories. 

Showing custom report in a viewlet

In 4.0, you can deploy new BIRT reports and make them appear in viewlets.

Track Recently Viewed

New in 4.0: Recently viewed section. Very nice. I can’t believe this didn’t previously exist. So you can see the last 75 Jazz items you clicked. Limitation for now is that it’s on a per-sever basis. In the future it may not be.

Create a leader board

What it says. This would seem to be obvious to me.

Someone asked how often a widget would be updated. Obviously doesn’t understand that dashboards are live. Queries are live, statistics use data in the warehouse.

Process tricks

New Feeds for Project

You can make new feeds in the Project Area Editor – Process Configuration tab in the Eclipse client. This would create a feed just for a project. When it’s in the catalog anyone else can add it (this doesn’t seem to be intermediate).

Change the project/team dashboard template

Again, this seems obvious.

Add a personal dashboard template

Personal dashboards live in JTS and our not tied to projects. They seem to be tied to applications though, with you have to add other application dashboards later.

New in 4.0: a personal dashboard wizard allowing you to pick the template from applications registered with JTS. Templates used to be exclusively tied to the process.

Project / Team details

New in 4.0: project and team dashboards come with a fixed area onthe right side of the first page. Current plan and timelines are shown in the area.

Q&A 

“Is there a plan for you to add role-specific dashboards?”
No. But once you have the personal dashboard, you can share them.

“I don’t see documentation on how to build a template using the special language that Jazz uses?” This one I was wondering as well.
I don’t think we documented it, but you can customize a dashboard from the process configuration tab.

“How do changes to dashboards affect existing dashboards?”
They don’t. Dashboards have to be recreated. We don’t go back and fix up existing dashboards.

My Thoughts

Most of this seemed basic. Some of it not so much, but I was hoping for information on developing my own custom widgets. That’s not what this presentation was for. It really was more about displaying the widgets. That doesn’t make this presentation bad, but just not entirely what I expected.