Rational Outlines Strategy At User Conference

Rational, a division of IBM Software based in Lexington, Mass., also plans to extend its best practices and methodologies, called Rational Unified Process, across IBM's other software brands Tivoli, DB2, WebSphere and Lotus, said Eric Schurr, vice president of marketing for Rational.

Rational will add content for building applications on products in all of IBM's software brands to its unified process, he said.

As part of Rational's plans to promote model-driven development, the company recently submitted the Reusable Asset Specification to the Object Management Group (OMG), a standards consortium, Schurr said.

Prior to becoming a division of IBM, Rational worked with IBM and other vendors such as Microsoft and Flashline to develop the spec, which describes how to make reusable software assets, such as code, models or tests.

Schurr said a standard for how to reuse software components has been a barrier to more asset reusability in software development.

Since the Reusable Asset Specification already is "a defacto standard" and mature set of guidelines for component reuse, support for reusing software assets through the spec should grow substantially now that the spec is under the OMG's stewardship, Schurr said.

Rational also will continue to update its modeling tools, such as Rational Rose, Rational XDE Developer, WebSphere Business Integrator and Rational Rapid Developer, to make model-driven development easier for developers, he added.

To improve testing through what Rational is calling its "quality by design" initiative, Schurr said the tools division is working with IBM's Tivoli division to provide a closer link between development and deployment.

The goal of Rational and Tivoli is to find software defects earlier in the deployment process so time is not wasted testing, fixing bugs and redeploying the software until it runs smoothly, he said.

Rational will update future versions of products such as Rational Robot, Rational Test Manager, Rational Suite Test Studio, Rational Purify Plus, Rational XDE Tester with automated testing functions to help developers "understand that attention to quality needs to span the lifecycle of software," Schurr said.

Finally, Rational plans to unify the combination of technologies comprised by enterprise change management, such as defect tracking, product tracking and requirements management software, so those functionalities "operate together on a unified base" and are easier to administer, operate and deploy, Schurr said.

Existing tools that will be affected by this initiative include Rational ClearCase, Rational ClearQuest, Rational Requesite Pro, Rational Project Council.