IBM released Engineering Lifecycle Management 7.0 for general release today, and while we’ve covered Requirements Management with DOORS Next in some detail, we wanted to also cover highlights of the rest of the suite.

Engineering Lifecycle Management

Name Changes

All of the applications have had their names changed, for better or for worse. I think some of these are going to have a hard time sticking. That said, here are the new names across the board:

Old Name	Old Acronym	New Name	New Acronymn
Rational or Collaborative Lifecycle Management or Continuous Engineering	CLM or CE	IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management	ELM
Rational DOORS	DOORS	DOORS Family	DOORS
Rational DOORS Next Generation	DNG	DOORS Next	DOORS Next
Rational Rhapsody	—	Rhapsody	—
Rational Rhapsody Design Manager	RDM	Rhapsody – Design Manger	RDM
Rational Rhapsody Model Manager	RMM	Rhapsody – Model Manager	RDM
Rational Quality Manager	RQM	Engineering Test Management	ETM
Rational Team Concert	RTC	Engineering Workflow Management	EWM
Rational Publishing Engine	RPE	Publishing	PUB
Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager	RELM	Engineering Insights	ENI
Rational Method Composer	—	Method Composer	MEC

The above is not the official IBM names to a T–I’ve slightly abbreviated some things. Keep that in mind.

New Look And Feel

The product banner looks much more modern.

Engineering Test Management

Clustering with Liberty Server

In theory this will improve performance. Please contact us or leave a comment below if you’re using this feature.

Improved Test Execution Performance

500 adapters running in parallel are supported! Pretty huge improvement there.

Mail Notifications

I actually developed a workaround for not having this years ago. It’s finally in the tool, fully supported!

LQE Manage Skipped Resources

You can ignore individual resources when LQE fails on a given artifact. Again, big improvement here.

Customize The “Related Information” Panels

I’ve never had a client ask for this, but I’m glad this is there.

Engineering Workflow Management

Improved Git Integration

• Command line script to make installation easier available for Node.js and Gitlab servers.
• Integration with Bitbucket server
• New process preconditions for Git Push operations

Duplicate a Change Set

This is interesting and I am not sure of why you would want to do this, but you can duplicate an active change set in Eclipse and Visual Studio.

Improved Look and Feel for Quick Planner and Program Board

The program board in particular looks fantastic! Of note, color tags are supported as well.

Publishing (Previously Rational Publishing Engine)

Unfortunately, there’s not much to report here as far as our interests. The improvements appear to have all gone to Document Builder and not to the Publishing thick client.

As an aside, it’s going to be very difficult for me to call it just “Publishing.” Really wish Publishing Engine had stuck instead.

Jazz Report Builder (JRS)

Custom Expressions Support Multiple Attributes

Previously, a report author could only create a custom column with a calculation on a single attribute. For instance, it was not possible to calculate a RPN for an FMEA-style report by creating a custom column that inspected both Likelihood and Occurence. You could only make a column that say, truncated Likelihood and that’s it. This was a *severe* limitation.

Enter version 7.0!