Rational Team Concert

IBM Rational Team Concert

Developer(s)	IBM
Initial release	June 2008
Written in	Java / JavaScript
Available in	German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian.
Type	Integrated development environment
License	IBM EULA
Website	jazz.net/projects/rational-team-concert

IBM Rational Team Concert is a software development team collaboration tool developed by the Rational brand of IBM and was first released in 2008. The software is available in both client versions and a Web version. It provides software development teams with a collaborative environment in which they can manage all aspects of their work, such as plans, tasks, revision control, build management, and reports.

Overview

IBM Rational Team Concert is built on the Jazz Platform, an extensible technology platform that helps teams integrate tasks across the software life cycle.

Rational Team Concert is built on a client-server architecture and it enables software development teams to track all aspects of their work, such as work items, source control, reporting, and build management, in a single product. Rational Team Concert integrates with several other products, including Subversion, Git, and IBM Rational ClearCase revision-control products, IBM Rational ClearQuest and JIRA change management products, IBM Rational Quality Manager and HP Quality Center quality management systems, and IBM Rational Build Forge, Hudson, Jenkins, CruiseControl, and Maven build and process automation tools.

Rational Team Concert has an Eclipse-based client interface, a Microsoft Visual Studio client interface, and a Web interface. Additionally it provides since version 4.0 a windows shell integration within the Windows Explorer for source control of files within the Rational Team Concert repository. The client interfaces provide an integrated development environment for developers to build and deliver artifacts. Users can use the Web interface to administer servers and projects, access project areas, browse repository information, update tasks, or read about recent events.

Rational Team Concert and the Jazz Platform are developed on Jazz.net, where developers and users collaborate in the development process through discussion forums and newsgroups. On Jazz.net registered users can watch Team Concert be built with visibility to dashboards, plans and work items and can also participate by submitting defects and enhancements. The Jazz.net community site also includes articles, forums, wikis, blogs, current documentation, and other troubleshooting and support resources for both developers and users.

Software life cycle management

Rational Team Concert provides a single, integrated environment for several aspects of the software development process, including agile planning, process definition, source control, defect tracking, build management, and reporting. Users can use the software to track and manage the relationships between artifacts, promote best practices for development, and gather project information.

In the product, users create work items to track tasks, such as enhancements, defects, or plan items. Among many other things, users can include these work items in plans for specific milestones and can link work items to source code. When a user creates or changes a work item, all members in the associated team are notified.

Users can share team information in the product by tracking team activity, posting detailed information, or configuring which information is visible.

License

Rational Team Concert is a commercial software product which has to be licensed according to the number of users which work with the software as well as the actions these users are allowed to perform with the system. However, IBM provides free license entitlements for qualified open source projects, academic users (research and classroom) as well as small commercial teams up to a maximum of 10 users.

For all other purposes IBM offers different client access licenses which are needed for every client which connects to the Rational Team Concert Server. These client access licenses are available in different types - authorized user licenses, floating user licenses, term based licenses and token based licenses - all with slightly different usage rights as well as prices to meet the demands of the various sized customers.

• Authorized: license based on physical individual users - each user needs a license and the license is not intended to be shared with other individuals

• Floating: based on the total number of users accessing the software at any time - license can be shared across the company worldwide

• Term: the usage right for the software is limited to a fixed term of 1 year - the license therefore is cheaper than a comparable authorized/floating license

• Token: instead of purchasing term based licenses of a specific software, a token license model allows to use several IBM Rational products to be used until a maximum amount of tokens which the company owns. The usage rights of the software products are limited to the contract duration and every Rational software will consume a different amount of tokens. This license model can be very attractive for large development organizations in terms of flexibility as well as internal accounting aspects since no investment in assets (software) is needed: all the costs are billed as services for the company, so no amortization accounting rules have to be taken into account.

Additionally these client access licenses are subdivided in user roles such as Developer, Contributor and Stakeholder. A developer CAL (authorized, floating, term, token) allows full access to the product for every functionality whereas a Contributor CAL provides access to mainly everything which is not related to source code operations and the Stakeholder CAL further reduces the accessible functionality to work items such as plans and live status views.

For the server product no additional license is needed and some client access licenses additionally support high availability or large scale deployments with distributed servers interconnected to each other.

Versions

• Version 1.0 was released in June 2008
• Version 2.0 was released in June 2009.
• Version 3.0 was released in November 2010.
• Version 3.0.1 was released in June 2011.
• Version 4.0 was released in June 2012.
• Version 4.0.1 was released in November 2012.
• Version 4.0.2 was released in March 2013.
• Version 4.0.3 was released in June 2013.
• Version 4.0.4 was released in September 2013.

External links

• Information center for Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management, Version 4.0.1
• Information center for Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management, Version 4.0
• Information center for Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management, Version 3.0.1
• Information center for IBM Rational Team Concert, Version 3.0
• Information center for IBM Rational Team Concert, Version 2.0.0.2
• Information center for IBM Rational Team Concert, Version 1.0
• Product page for Rational Team Concert
• IBM developerWorks page for Rational Team Concert
• Jazz.net development site for Rational Team Concert
• IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials Book on Amazon