During some courseware authoring I discovered a poorly known (but sufficiently documented) feature in Rational Developer for IBM i (and also available in IBM Developer for System z). Both tools use the LPEX editor as the default editor for source (although IDz has dedicated editors for COBOL, JCL, PL/I, and C/C++). The LPEX editor has … Read more
Break down the silos Mainframe development does not and should not be that much different from distributed development. There is a strong desire to modernize the development and operations of mainframe systems (zDevOps), to increase business agility, improve customer satisfaction, accelerate business value delivery, and to improve developer job satisfaction. One of the areas to … Read more
In a recent project for a z/OS customer, we had to create some custom scripts to kick off a Rational Team Concert Promotion definition. This is a special type of build definition found in the RTC Enterprise Extensions, and is used for promoting change sets from one stream to another, by their attachments to work … Read more
Why you should change the default certificates? If you are a user of IBM Rational Team Concert, DOORs Next Generation, Quality Manager, Design Manger, or Engineering Lifecycle Manager, you likely have seen the issue with the browser stating “Your connection is not private”, and red error showing in the browser URL as ‘Not Secure’. If … Read more
I recently ran across an issue, one that was low priority, but nagging like a gnat on a hot summer day. I kept seeing these entries in the log files: ERROR ervice.internal.GlobalConfigurationCacheUpdateTask – [operationId=976] com.ibm.team.jfs.app.http.HttpServiceUnavailableException: Unable to discover the GC service, which might indicate that Global Configuration Management is not set up in JTS. Please … Read more
The Business Scenario We recently had a challenge where a customer needed full end-to-end SSL/TLS encryption for communcation between IBM Team Concert, and Urbancode Deploy. They are a z/OS Mainframe customer implementing these tools for continuous Integration / continuous deployment operations. Team Concert in this case, handles dependency build (compilation) of z/OS source code (COBOL, … Read more
We have worked with several customers in the past few years, and have come to a general consensus on the minimum operation behaviors that should be enabled in your Team Concert project. These that we have listed are in additional to any you may already have (rather than a replacement of them). These also do … Read more
In Rational Team Concert’s build functionality, there is capability to show the build compilation report. This is available by a simple checkbox for Java type builds, but in z/OS dependency builds, it requires some additional configuration to get it working property. A compilaton report can show errors and warnings that occured durring the compile. It … Read more
Linux is a very popular platform to run the IBM CLM tools on (i.e. Quality Manger, Team Concert, DOORs NG, etc). However, out of the box, there is not a built in autostart feature for the platform. Naturally, you want this to autostart in a production environment. Here is a handy systemd unit file. First, … Read more
Strongback works with many large mainframe customers, in the financial services, government, insurance, and manufacturing sectors. We’ve been involved in quite a few migrations from various SCM systems to Rational Team Concert. Most of these customers choose to run Team Concert with a DB2 backend running on z/OS (DB2z). As such, we often run into the … Read more