New To Rational
Get acquainted with IBM Rational's software delivery tools and integrated platform for governing software and systems delivery
The developerWorks Rational site is a collection of technical resources for developers, administrators, business planners, and other technical personnel who want to learn how to exploit the many features of the Rational Software Delivery Platform. The site is updated weekly with the latest Rational related events, product announcements, and includes new additions to the extensive collection of articles, tutorials, code samples, roadmaps, and other technical materials.
What is IBM Rational?
From project design to implementation, IBM Rational helps bring technology and software together to help you and your team collaborate more effectively on software development and delivery projects. Today's focus is on increasing productivity, reducing time to market and responding quickly to new technologies to drive innovation and increase customer value. The IBM Rational Software Delivery platform helps you to solve challenges ranging from understanding the impact of open source software to managing risk, from catching bugs in testing to improving communication across worldwide development teams.The IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform is an integrated platform providing a complete solution for developing software and software-based systems. It allows practitioners to operate more efficiently and deliver innovative products and services that set their organizations apart from their competitors.
By controlling the process of software development in an open, proven and yet modular manner, software development teams can:
- Manage value by automating and enforcing best practices that keep your software projects aligned with changing business priorities
- Develop flexibly with an open, collaborative software development platform that offers maximum freedom in selecting how and where you source projects.
- Control risk and change with a solution that captures, communicates, and integrates policies, practices, and metrics across project teams and diverse contributors throughout the software life cycle.
Regardless of platform or application type - Eclipse, Java, .NET, Linux or embedded and pervasive - Rational takes you from start to finish, ensuring the complete success of your project. Success in today's on demand marketplace depends on a company's ability to differentiate business performance in both good times and bad.The IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, a cross IBM Software Group solution, enables differentiation by defining, automating and integrating the key aspects of software across roles, from the analyst to the architect, developer, tester and project manager. The IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform is:
- Proven. It’s not just tools, IBM Rational’s Software Delivery Platform emphasizes best practices and processes which make thousands of high-performance software teams and practitioners successful.
- Complete. Gain visibility throughout your software lifecycle by supporting every member of your development team, as well as your business and operations stakeholders.
- Open. You can leverage existing assets and choose from a wide array of development languages, deployment platforms, and partner technologies - including Microsoft .NET, BEA, and Oracle solutions.
- Modular. Choose the exact tools and adoption path that best fit your needs. Use your existing tools with components of the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform - no need to "rip and replace" what you already have.
To learn how Rational contributes to an SOA environment see Rational and SOA.
To see how Rational relates to other IBM software see New to IBM software.
What can Rational do for me and my company?
Most vendors offering IT solutions often fail to address the entire software delivery lifecycle, focusing on only those portions of the cycle with which they have expertise. However, with companies under significant pressure to transform IT from a cost center into a cost effective enabler of innovation and business success, overlooked portions of the delivery lifecycle are overlooked opportunities for improving your software team’s effectiveness, predictability and productivity.
IBM Rational’s business driven development approach is unique in its breadth, addressing each and every phase of the software delivery lifecycle, helping teams to manage value, develop flexibly and control risk and change. With the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, software development teams are provided tools for the key roles:
- For the Project Manager: a variety of interactive dashboards to help management make investment decisions based upon up-to-the-minute information concerning project health and resource availability.
- For Architects: specialized tools to capture business process design and system requirements and then help translate them into executable code.
- For Developers: development processes and best practices to provide direction and give advice for teams lacking discipline or looking for greater efficiency
- For the entire team: workflow automation software to help streamline development and delivery.
- For the entire team: integrated products to establish clear links, traceable relationships and secure content for all of the assets created by and for the software delivery lifecycle
Figure 1. Rational capabilities
Rational offers both solution-focused offerings specializing in issues such as globally distributed teams, regulatory compliance and the adoption of service oriented development approaches, as well as product and integrated product suites for individual practitioners across the software delivery spectrum.
Solution portfolios
Capabilities
Architecture Management and Construction
IBM® Rational® offers industry-leading architecture management tools for architecture and design modeling, model-driven development, component testing, static and runtime analysis activities. Focused on software analysts, architects and developers, Architecture Management is a capability centered on managing changes to software architectures and to ensure architectural integrity and alignment with current requirements and implementations, while providing best of breed development environments. IBM Rational’s Architecture Management portfolio is based on the industry leading Eclipse open source software development framework, ensuring tight integrations with other IBM and third party applications.
Change and Release Management
BM Rational offers comprehensive, integrated change and release management products for successful software delivery. These solutions help software and systems development teams empower the business by accelerating software delivery, making global teams more efficient, and governing end-to-end software processes. IBM change and release management solutions include:
These solutions can help you improve productivity, gain better visibility into projects and processes, manage distributed organizations, and provide audit trails and traceability across the software lifecycle for fast delivery of high-quality software.
Process and Portfolio Management
Project and portfolio managers need to prioritize investments across projects and to accurately scope, estimate, schedule and manage resources. IBM delivers comprehensive process and portfolio management capabilities for the project manager with tools to manage the IT project portfolio lifecycle, reusable processes with the templates and guidance you need to manage project work, application lifecycle management solutions to bridge development and operations, and the proven expertise in facilitating the organizational transformation that is essential to aligning IT with business objectives.
Quality Management
IBM Rational quality management provides a full set of software delivery process guidance, best practices and integrated tools, supporting a broad range of heterogeneous applications to help testers and software quality teams to achieve improvements in cost efficiency, quality metrics and time-to-value for business-critical projects.
Our solutions enable teams to build quality into their products, using automation capabilities to accelerate discovery and diagnosis, ensuring clean communication between the business, development, quality assurance and IT operations. These offerings are optimized to provide actionable development asset traceability, accelerated problem determination, and early detection of post-deployment availability risks.
How can I learn more about Rational?
Bookmark and visit the developerWorks Rational site to learn more about the Rational Software Delivery Platform and tooling, whether you are a new user of Rational products, or an expert. It is updated weekly with the latest Rational related events, product announcements, and new additions to the extensive collection of technical materials such as how-to articles.
Try these links in the left navigation of developerWorks Rational:
- Products: Lists and links to resource pages for the major product families and the key products in the Rational brand.
- Downloads: Provides free trial copies of many of the Rational products along with evaluation resources and links to information on how to buy the product. Support downloads and IBM partner Ready for Rational plug-ins are also available.
- Technical library: Includes an ever-growing collection of technical articles, samples, tutorials, and other materials, developed by internal and third-party Rational experts.
- Training: Includes Rational classroom courses, online education, and self-study materials.
- Support: Provides solutions to, and information about, technical questions.
- Services: Leads you to experts who can help you architect, implement, and monitor software applications.
- Forums and community: Helps you locate and interact with other Rational product users through discussion forums, blogs, and more.
Some other key resources you can access:
- The Rational Edge - the e-zine for the Rational Community, with technical information on the concepts behind effective software development.
- developer Works Rational newsletter - Keep up with developerWorks Rational content. Every other week, you'll receive updates on the latest technical resources and best practices for the Rational software platform.
- Rational Software Global User Group Community - Rational User Groups are independent, user-run organizations that provide an open forum to promote information exchange between customers and Rational staff.
To get product information, such as how to buy a Rational product or to see a business case study, see Rational software.
Business partners can also check out the wealth of Rational resources available at the
IBM PartnerWorld
