IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Method Composer

IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization – Method Composer is a flexible process management platform with a method authoring tool and a process asset library to help you implement measured improvement of your enterprise, systems engineering or software delivery processes. Method Composer tooling lets you create, edit, manage and publish process descriptions. The process and practice libraries provide best practice content that you can reuse as is or tailor to compose your own processes. IBM Lifecycle Optimization Method Composer enables process engineers and managers to implement, deploy, and maintain processes for organizations or individual projects.

The Method Composer educates development teams on the methods applicable to the roles that they are responsible for. Software developers typically need to learn how to do analysis and design, testers need to learn how to test implementations against requirements, managers need to learn how to manage the project scope and change, and so on. Some organizations assume that developers implicitly know how to do such work without documenting their methods, but many organizations want to establish common and regulated practices, to drive specific improvement objectives, and to meet compliance standards.

IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization – Method Composer provides a knowledge base of intellectual capital which you can browse, manage and deploy. This content can include externally developed content, and, more importantly, can include your own content which can consist of whitepapers, guidelines, templates, principles, best practices, internal procedures and regulations, training material, and any other general descriptions of your methods. This knowledge base can used for reference and education. It also forms the basis for developing processes (the second purpose). Rational Method Composer is designed to be a content management system that provides a common management structure and look and feel for all of your content, rather than being a document management system in which you would store and access hard to maintain legacy documents all in their own shapes and formats. All content managed in Rational Method Composer can be published to HTML and deployed to Web servers for distributed usage.

The Method Composer also educates the development teams on how to apply these methods throughout a development lifecycle. That is, they need to define or select a development process. For example, requirements management methods have to be applied differently in early phases of a project where the focus is on elicitation of stakeholder needs and requirements and scoping a vision, than in later phases where the focus is on managing requirements updates and changes and performing impact analysis of these requirements changes. Teams also need clear understanding of how the different tasks of the methods relate to each other, for example, how the change management method impacts the requirements management method as well as regression testing method throughout the lifecycle. Even self-organizing teams need to define a process that gives at minimum some guidance on how the development will be scoped throughout the lifecycle, when milestones will be achieved and verified, and so on.

IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization – Method Composer provides process engineering capabilities by supporting process engineers and project managers in selecting, tailoring, and rapidly assembling processes for their concrete development projects. Rational Method Composer provides catalogs of pre-defined processes 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 management styles. These building blocks form a toolkit for quick assembly of processes based on project-specific needs. Rational Method Composer also allows you to set up your own organization-specific capability pattern libraries. Finally, the processes created with Rational Method Composer can be published and deployed as Web sites. They can also be deployed as project plan templates for Rational Portfolio Manager.