A Software Factory Integrating Rational Team Concert and WebSphere tools

A Software Factory Integrating Rational
& WebSphere Tools
Greg Hodgkinson,
Practice Director, Lifecycle Tools and Methodology

André Tost,
Senior Technical Staff Member, Software Group

Session 1741

1

Session Introduction
 Abstract: “Getting any software development team to effectively scale to meet the needs of a large integration
project is actually harder than it sounds. For a large Automotive Retailer based in Florida, this is exactly what
they needed to do. They needed a large amount of integration to be built between their brand new Point of
Sales system and their new SAP back-end. In this session, you will hear about how tools such as Rational
Software Architect and WebSphere Message Broker Toolkit were integrated with a Rational Team Concert-based
development environment to set up super efficient software factory employing techniques such as Model-
Driven Development and Continuous Integration to help this retailer keep their customers’ wheels on the road.”

Topics for today:
The project
The challenges faced
The software factory tools
The software factory workflow
Key practices that helped us succeed
The benefits
Final thoughts

2

Introducing the Project
A new automotive retail in-store experience
 Replacing green screen terminals in the store with modern user
interfaces
– Touch screens
– Tablets
– Customer self-service “kiosks”
– In-store WiFi
– Completely new private network (MPLS)

 Replacing legacy backend application for customer
management, order management and inventory management
– Transitioning from JDEdwards to SAP

 Middleware integration layer
– Exposing backend functionality as reusable business services
– Fully virtualized, scalable infrastructure
• Private cloud on X86/Linux

3

Introducing the Project (cont.)
Service orientation as the architectural foundation
 Building an integration layer consisting of service exposure AND
provider creation

Diagram taken from developerWorks article “The Enterprise Service Bus, re-examined”,
4
see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/1105_flurry/1105_flurry.html

Introducing the Project
Challenges faced
 Multi-vendor, global development team
– US
– China
– Egypt
– Philippines
 Requirements were limited to screenshots
– Hundreds of wire frames, very useful for data modeling
– No functional business requirements

 Three layers (client UI, integration layer, backend/SAP) all designed and
developed in parallel
– (Semi-)Agile development process required

 Brand new infrastructure
– New network, new platform, new middleware

 Plus, all the usual project constraints 
– Tight schedule
5
– Constrained budget

Introducing the Software Factory Tools
WebSphere Message Broker
1) Simplified
Reducing the complexity of integration authoring
integrating your systems

Point-to-point is expensive
Integration requires specialist
knowledge of API technologies
Integration plumbing and mapping
code wastes developer hours
Mixing integration code with
application code makes
applications brittle
Integrations have high availability
and reliability requirements – 2) Dynamic mediation
complexity 3) Routes and transforms data

4) Supports multiple
technologies
6

Rational Requirements Composer
1) All-in-one editor – 2) Easy traceability
Managing and communicating text as well as link creation and
your software requirements diagrams “surfing”
Poor requirements is the #1
reason projects fail
Traceability is NB, but time
consuming
Difficult to correlate scope lists
with specifications
As soon as requirements
documents are released they can
become out of date 3) Visual focus –
Often the author > review > 4) Built-in review
process, use case, workflow
feedback > rework process is screen mockups
inefficient
5) Strong lifecycle links – to plans, to
designs, to code, to builds, to tests
7

Rational Software Architect for WebSphere

Controlling the architectural 1) Supports popular modeling
quality of your software standards – UML, BPMN2, SoaML

2) Turn models into
Difficult to handle software
code with
complexity – too much of it
transformations
Lose sight of good patterns when
3) Automatically
you are “down in the code”
apply model
Refactoring of code is expensive
patterns
Large mental leap between
requirements and code
How do you make design a “team 4) Graphical code
game”? editors and visualizers

5) Design Manager
adds web-based
8
collaboration

Rational Team Concert
1) Like 5 tools in one – plans, work items,
Managing and enabling change SCM, build, project data warehouse

Plans can quickly become out of
date
Progress views limited to point-in- 2) Fully integrated data
time snapshots and waste effort across lifecycle
How to easily track what work was
delivered in a new build? 3) Excellent support for
How to easily track SCM changes agile as well as
against plans? “traditional” project styles
How to correlate all project data in
a format that is easy to consume 4) Built-in build support
(and has value) including build engine

5) SCM provides support
for streams, components,
workspaces – flexible,
simple, powerful
9

The Software Factory Workflow
Coordinating requirements and designs across
technology stacks
 Constraint: 3 teams working on 3 separate but related streams.

 Driven by UI wireframes
 Derived scope list (RRC)
 Transferred to plans (RTC)
 Requirements specs written for
service operations (RRC/RSA)
 Designs specs written for service
operations (RSA)
 Front-end-WSDL generated
(RSA)
 Implementations and stubs
(WMBT)
10

Timing is everything!
 Ideal: Back-end WSDL available to SOA integration analysts.

11

 Not so good: Back-end WSDL arrives during SOA design.

12

 Getting bad: Back-end WSDL not available for SOA implementation.

13

 The pits: Back-end implementation not available to test against.

14

Coordinating distributed development and
integrating the results
 Workflow tuned to high velocity without sacrificing quality.
implementation
wsdl
SOA SOA
analysts designers
implementation feedback
wsdl

RSA Cairo SOA
Continuous
build/deploy
RRC RTC devs RTC
service
requirements scm implementation scm
model wsdl

WMB
DEV
wsdl
implementation
wsdl

On-demand
China SOA build/deploy

WMB
QA
devs
UI & back-end UI & back-end
implementation
analysts, designers, wsdl
stakeholders stakeholders

implementation
wsdl feedback

US SOA
devs

15

Key Practices for Success
Tighter architectural control using RSA
 Solution architecture modeled
in UML
 Service model developed in UML
– Initial version derived from
use case descriptions
– Collaboratively finalized via
LotusLive sessions
– ~30 services with ~160 operations

 WSDL automatically generated
from UML
– Using out-of-the-box RSA
transformation
– Some required modification
done via XSLT

 Both UML and WSDL stored
in RTC

16

Keeping the team on track using RTC
 Service operation tracking
– Separate tracking for each service interface and each service operation gives indication of
progress
• See later slide for example

 Easy assignment of work items to individuals
– For net new development and defect fixes
– Good way of communicating with offshore teams

 Impediments
– Communication of (typically blocking) issues across distributed teams
– Identified and/or assigned also during daily scrum meeting

 Custom “change control” work item allowed tracking of changes
to the service model
– Linkage to individual work items (model change, implementation change, etc)
– Notification to interested users

17

Collaborative configuration management using RTC
 Streams for easy management of
different configurations
– Code configuration for each
environment: DEV > QA > PROD
– Easy to promote changes through
environments
 Components allow for groups of
artefacts to be managed together
– Separate out code components, tests, stubs,
models, documents
– Component per application component
• Loading and unloading
• Consolidated history
• Easy to snapshot
18

Collaborative configuration management using RTC
 Project events provides an excellent way
to quickly see latest changes
– Easy to see what real (as opposed to
planned) current focus of work is
– Can click straight into work context for
more
– Keeps team aware of dependencies
 The “Pending changes” view became a
core element of governance
– Good overview of who changed what and why
– Allows enforcement of compliance with established
standards - Naming, code structure, etc.
– Changes are organised by component – making it
easier to focus on the changes that matter to you
19

Hassle-free build and deploy using RTC
 RTC’s simple build engine + Prolifics Build
Conductor = effortless builds!
– ANT build engine simple and easy to use
– PBC adds automation scripts for
WebSphere apps: WESB, WMB, WPS, Portal
– Automated build, override, deploy
 Build record publishes a wealth of
information
– What was built – BARs
– What tasks/requirements/fixes included
– What change sets included
– Full log files as well as activity view
20

Hassle-free build and deploy using RTC
 Different builds for different purposes
– Continuous integration build that only catches compile errors
can look for changes every few minutes
– Continuous integration build that deploys to DEV can be run
every 2 hours
– On-demand build to target QA can be triggered when
needed

 Accelerated fix delivery
– From build record snapshot, can create a new fix workspace
within seconds
– Suspend and unload existing changes, then code the fix and
deliver to fix
– As soon as delivered, on-demand build can deploy changes
automatically to environment of choice
– Fantastically quick turnaround of fixes!

21

Project dashboard using RTC - Overview

22

Project dashboard using RTC – Release status

23

Project dashboard using RTC - Impediments

24

Project dashboard using RTC – Change controls

25

How Did We Benefit?
Improving team efficiency
 Using RTC client plug-in for Eclipse-based tooling supports
online and offline work
– Especially helpful when having many travelling developers
 Fine grained control over which changes are
replicated/downloaded
 Using one component per service was a good structure
– Good support of having development teams work concurrently on
different service implementations
 Minimal delays to get changes to testers
 Separate build streams for dedicated, continuous builds
– More build engines would have been beneficial
 Shared build infrastructure meant developers didn’t maintain
26
their own

How Did We Benefit?
Improving deliverable quality
 Using a UML-based service model
– Visual representation used to communicate interface to the
development team
 Component-based source control made developers think more
about how their code was structured
 Automated build and deploy caught issues earlier
 Handed over a fully automated and structured build and deploy
infrastructure along with the source code - to the benefit of the
maintenance team

27

Final Thoughts
Session wrap-up
 A large project, with a global team of developers and testers, required
global collaboration and cooperation
 Tying individual development tools into one team environment, RTC,
facilitated sharing of artefacts and joint development of solutions
– Need good structure of streams and components, based on target
runtimes and team organization
 Project management features of RTC allow direct integration of
planning activities with the developed artifacts
 Continuous automated builds important enough to have a full time
release engineer
 Using Eclipse as the foundation for all tooling makes it easier to
integrate different environments and target runtimes
 You still need good developers and strong governance!
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Copyright and Trademarks

© IBM Corporation 2012. All Rights Reserved.

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A Software Factory Integrating Rational Team Concert and WebSphere tools

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