Working notes from real z/OS engagements — Endevor-to-Git migrations, DBB builds, IDz performance, code pages, and mainframe CI/CD. The same knowledge we bring to yours.
Manual deployments suck Lets face it, we’ve all had the “deployment weekend” nightmare. You plan for a half day of deployment, but it ends up turning into a day and half of wasted time because you’ve either missed something, deployed the wrong version, set the wrong environment parameter, or a late defect showed up that … Read more
For years, you’ve probably heard about “traceability”, that mysterious shangri-la that are read about in case studies. Well, obtaining traceability is not rocket science in IBM’s CLM tools. This video below shows you how to set it up at an atomic level, meaning, between specific artifacts between the three CLM applications. In a nutshell, you … Read more
The defect work item in Team Concert has a attribute labeled “Found In”. This field is not populated by default, and often causes confusion for new users. The intention for this field is to tell the development which release the defect was found in. Thus it’s important to understand, that RTC will certainly not know … Read more
We have finally updated our website to address the services we’ve actually been doing over the past few years. For so long, we’ve neglected the content on the website, frankly, because we were too busy. Now, after a couple of weeks of intensive work, we finally have content that reflects what we really do and … Read more
This is from our presentation at the InterConnect 2016 conference in Las Vegas, February 2016.IBM Rational Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) can dynamically transform your terminal-based applications into rich web pages. It is highly customizable and built on Java EE technology. We discussed some lessons learned from a very (very) complex HATS engagement. We also … Read more
Rational Team Concert uses work items as the “glue” to bind various artifacts together. It links source code change sets to tasks, tasks to user stories, defects to test plans, stories to requirements. Work item queries allow you to easily create repeatable searches into the RTC system for just about any work item type and … Read more
This video was requested by a customer to show their employees how to create a personal dashboard from a project area. These videos are in the public domain by intention, and thus our ability to share it with you. In this situation, we created a custom dashboard template in the project area’s configuration. Widgets were … Read more
First Rule: Write Good User Stories If you are just getting started with writing user stories, I highly recommend Mike Cohn’s book User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development. Perhaps you’re coming from a background of writing large use cases. Perhaps you’re fresh out of school and not familiar with requirements management. If you’re already … Read more
This week we presented at the IBM InterConnect conference in Vegas. This was information compiled from multiple customer engagements over the past few years. Patterns and Antipatterns for Adopting IBM DevOps Ttools from Strongback Consulting If you are looking to implement the IBM platform as your Application Lifecycle Management platform of choice, and need help … Read more
If you are at IBM InterConnect, you’ll frequently hear the phrase “shift left”. Its meaning may go over your head at first, but here is what it means. Everyone has heard this before, but the latter in the development cycle a defect is caught, the more expensive it is to fix. In the chart above, … Read more