IBM Rational Method Composer
The IBM Rational Method Composer (RMC) is a commercial product (built on top of Eclipse) for authoring, configuring, viewing, and publishing processes.
The Rational Unified Process (RUP) process framework within IBM Rational Method Composer includes:
- A process content library based on the best practices adopted in thousands of RUP projects worldwide.
- Out-of-the-box delivery processes to provide the project manager with a quick starting point for planning and initiating a project. A delivery process will provide an initial project template, identify what milestones to have in the project, what work products to be delivered by each milestone, and what resources are needed for each phase.
- Capability patterns that allow project managers to rapidly add or remove reusable chunks of processes addressing common problems. Since no two projects are alike, project managers need to rapidly modify the process to address the specific project needs.
RMC has two main purposes:
- RMC is a content management system that provides a common management structure and look and feel for all process content. All content managed in RMC can be published to HTML and deployed to Web servers for distributed usage.
- RMC provides process engineers and project managers with the capability of selecting, tailoring, and rapidly assembling processes for their concrete development projects. RMC provides catalogs of pre-defined processes (like RUP) for typical project situations that can be adapted to individual needs. It also provides process building blocks called capability patterns that represent best development practices for specific disciplines, technologies, or development styles. These building blocks form a toolkit for quickly assembling processes based on project specific needs. Finally, the documented processes created with RMC can be published and deployed as Web sites. They can also be deployed as project plan templates for IBM Rational Portfolio Manager.
In addition to full RUP, RMC provides RUP plug-ins (extensions to the RUP content that can only be installed on top of RUP) for important areas such as service-oriented architectures (RUP for SOA), systems engineering (RUP SE), packaged application development (RUP for COTS), program and portfolio management, and the IBM Tivoli Unified Process (ITUP) library that addresses IT Service Management. New delivery processes are added frequently and are made available through the IBM developerWorks Website.
There is an open source version of IBM RMC created as part of the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) project. The EPF tool contains full process authoring and publishing capabilities. The main difference between EPF and the Rational Method Composer tool is the lack of integrations with other IBM Rational tools such as Rational Portfolio Manager and Rational Software Architect as well as lack of a migration capability from Rational Process Workbench. EPF comes with OpenUP/Basic, a new agile process for small teams applying RUP principles and practices.
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