Tool Support

Managing all this change is hard. The complexity of doing it right, day after day, grows exponentially with the size of the team, the size of the product (that is, the number of artifacts), the geographic distribution of the team, and the schedule pressure. It is error-prone , tedious , and labor- intensive and is therefore an obvious task that can benefit from tool support and automation.

The Rational Suite of software development tools supports the configuration and change management workflow with the following tools:

• Rational ClearCase assists with the configuration management portion.

• Rational ClearQuest assists with the change request management and status and measurement portions.

The Rational Unified Process provides tool mentors for both tools.

Unified Change Management

Unified Change Management (UCM) is Rational Software's approach to managing change in software system development, from requirements to release. UCM spans the development lifecycle, defining how to manage change to requirements, design models, documentation, components , test cases, and source code.

One of the key aspects of the UCM model is that it unifies the activities used to plan and track project progress and the artifacts undergoing change. The UCM model is realized by both process and tools. The Rational products ClearCase and ClearQuest are the foundation technologies for UCM. ClearCase manages all the artifacts produced by a software project, including both system artifacts and project management artifacts. ClearQuest manages the project's tasks , defects, and requests for enhancements (referred to generically as activities) and provides the charting and reporting tools necessary to track project progress.

Unified Change Management is described in the book by our colleagues Brian White and Geoffrey Clemm, Software Configuration Management Strategies and Rational Clearcase: A Practical Introduction (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2000).