Understanding SAFe Work In Progress Limits

What is WIP? WIP stands for Work In Progress. Limiting your work in progress is a concept of Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe. By limiting your WIP, you force your team to focus on completing existing tasks before starting new tasks or requirements in the project. Let’s start with an analogy: the “honey-do list”. Its … Read more

A Rosetta Stone for IBM’s Jargon and Acronyms

This list is by no means complete (that would take weeks to compile). This list is constructed based on our past several months experience on IBM engagements and customers implementing IBM DevOps software. We will likely update this list well into the future.    CCM = The Change and Configuration Management application running on WebSphere … Read more

5 Tips to Accelerate Adoption of Rational Developer for System z

Reasoning We’ve been involved in several large scale deployments of Rational Developer for System z. The product is an incredible piece of software that can drastically improve software development productivity. It also will drastically change your development organization’s culture (usually for the better). However to have the best culture change, you need to be prepared … Read more

Stop manual deployment or scripting deployments to WebSphere App Server – there is a better way

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

Easy peasy cross project linking and traceability in IBM CLM (RTC, DOORs, and RQM)

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

InterConnect 2016: Tips for Developing and Testing IBM HATS Applications

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