What is the status of IBM product XYZ?

If you like me, often want to know what the current status is of a particular product, check out this link and bookmark it for later. It gives you the product lifecycle dates of various Rational products and associated versions of those products.

The site answers the questions:

• When did a product version get released?
• What is the latest version?
• When does support for my version expire?

Rational product support lifecycle
WebSphere Support Lifecycle
Lotus Product Support Lifecycle

I don't see similar links for any of the Information Managment or Tivoli brands. If you find them, feel free to post as a response, and I'll update this post.

Migrating from Rational ClearCase LT to Rational Team Concert

Last year, IBM announced it was withdrawing Rational ClearCase LT from marketing , meaning end of the road for the product. For a few years, IBM had positioned CCLT (with disappointing results) as a competitor to Subversion (which it really wasn't). To be fair, CCLT does thinks Subversion does not - such as distributed storage, automated branching and merging. It also required a (near) full time admin to understand it. Subversion was simply easier to install and configure for most teams, and only that 1% of customers really needed the advanced features. Yes, I've used CCLT. I've installed it, upgraded it, migrated, and otherwise wrestled with it. It certainly had its place. Its bigger brother is certainly more powerful, and for large distributed development teams, it fills a niche very well.

Many customers however, just did not need or use some of the advanced features. Now they have to figure out what to migrate to, and there are three good options:

1. Upgrade to full ClearCase - This is a good option if a customer is already used to UCM, they like the standalone client for their development, perhaps they are not using an Eclipse or Visual Studio based client, and they would like dynamic views. This option has a very fairly easy upgrade path, but with some additional licensing costs. The system administration is near identical save for the addition of managing dynamic views.
   
2. Migrate to Subversion - This is an option for customers who really just want to downsize. Perhaps they are very small shops with only a few developers and CC was overkill. The disadvantage is that you lose automated branching and merging, but also lose the licensing costs.
3. Migrate to Rational Team Concert - RTC has been out for a while, and if you search for RTC on the interwebs, you'll probably come right back to this blog :) For small teams, RTC Express-C is free for up to 10 developers. You can import a UCM stream directly into RTC using the ClearCase History Import tool. This IMHO, is the best route, as you now add all the awesomeness of RTC into the mix. You still get developer sandboxes, and can manage different team streams. Now you also get work item tracking (defects, tasks, enhancements, stories), automated builds, traceability, agile iteration planning, and dashboards. RTC express-c is dead simple to setup. Team Concert Standard, and Team Concert for Power Systems requires a bit of planning however. This is the strategic direction that IBM is going.

I should say, a fourth option is to just be stubborn and stay on ClearCase LT. That means your other tools will be held back from evolving also. I recommend that you research your application lifecyle management. Do you have a process methodology? Do you want to move to looking at your application development from a holistic approach? Do you want to begin incorporating test management early in the development lifecycle? Are you contemplating automation for your environment (build automation, test automation, audit automation, etc)? If any of these apply, then I recommend you take option 3 above.

The Jazz team had very nice article about importing in ClearCase Base and UCM histories (see the link). The importer creates work items that contain useful information about the Base or UCM ClearCase label type as a result of bringing over this change for a back reference into ClearCase.

If an RTC implementation is of interest to you, give us a shout, and we can help you set up a road map from pilot to production usage.

Important HOT fix for Lotus Domino error ("The collection has become invalid.")

Several bloggers had posted issues with an error message in their logs on Domino 7.0.4, 7.0.4.1, 8.0.2.2, 8.0.2.3, 8.0.2.4, 8.5.0.1, 8.5.1, and 8.5.1 FP1. This error will show in your log file as "The collection has become invalid." It is caused by a fix to another SPR where in your LotusScript or Java code, you are looping through a view, using GetDocumentbyKey(key).

The original fix was designed to prevent an infinite loop, which it did by limiting the number of iterations to a fixed number, and then returning an error afterward. This in effect, broke many applications, and required immediate remediation to get critical applications working. Organizations with thousands of lines of this code, faced huge issues!

A hot fix was released yesterday (March 12) to address this problem. Now the algorithm still ensures that only a limited number of attempts is made to update a view. However, instead of returning the error message when the view is unable to be brought up to date, the code will return the most recent contents of the view. This allows existing applications to work as they always have, with no modification.

If you are running any of the above versions of Domino, you should submit a PMR to get the hotfix. Click here to open a service request with IBM Support.

Linking defects to related defects and tasks in RTC

As you begin working with RTC and work items, you'll find you have similar work items - they have similar titles, or affect the same artifact, etc. You can link work items to others so that as you or the assignee start to work on these items, the owner is aware that whatever he/she does with that artifact will have effect with similar items. In such a case the work item owner can just take ownership of the similar entries, or if these are perhaps new defects, the orginal task owner can take ownership of the defects.

In the Work Items view, right click on the defect, and select 'Link to Work Item'. Then you'll be prompted to select the type of linkage.

In this case I had two defects (requests from the customer for different fonts and colors), that I linked back to the parent task. This linkage will then be visible from the original task, as well as from the defect. This is visible on the 'links' tab.




Another useful way to link items, it to insert a work item link from the discussion area in a related work item. While adding discussion text, right click and select 'Insert Work Item Link'. Having linkages between work items, helps to build better knowledge about the system under construction. It also helps people who are new to a project to get ramped up much faster, and are less likely to repeat certain regression type errors.

Using VI or VIM for Linux - making your editor a much richer experience

Vi is to the Linux/Unix world as 'edit' is to MS-DOS. If you use Vi, you are probably aware of vim, which a more robust tool, but very similar. I won't dive into the whole history - goto Wikipedia for that.

Unless you have specifically installed Vim on Ubuntu or modified the .vimrc file on OpenSuse, you will probably get the basic text interface to the text file you are editing. All the text will be one color and there are no line numbers.

Adding this .vimrc text file to your home directory will light up the editor like a Christmas tree. You'll be able to edit html, jsp, xml, properties files and more have a rich UI (for a text editor that is), that will really help you better manage your text files.

ftp://ftp.strongbackconsulting.com/.vimrc

For ubuntu, be sure and run "apt-get install vim" to get the latest version of it. It won't work until you do!

*NOTE: I am linking to this file from my own website, as the original author no longer has the site available (http://www.stripey.com/vim/). I do give proper credit, however to Mr. Smyler, as you have certainly made life easier!

Planning and tracking work items in Rational Team Concert

Team Concert is such a cool flexible tool, and there are so many features that its easy to miss, yet its easy to get started with. It just 'grows' as your environment needs. I learned a few things from this video and and just have to share. I really like that you can edit code directly from source control, save it to a stream, associate it with a work item, and then submit it to a build all within the web interface.

The ability to do resource leveling using drag and drop between sprints is also wickedly cool. One view to see the work load of your entire team like a Gantt chart, but without the evil side effects like you have in MS Project.

Common installation issues/fixes with Rational Team Concert for Power Systems

If you are installing the new Rational Team Concert for Power Systems (RTCp), which is the follow on to RTCi, there are a few common installation issues you might run into.

First, be sure and check all the system requirements for the product. RTCp server can be installed on i/OS, AIX, and Windows. I highly recommend that you install on a WebSphere App Server 7.0 server. Make sure you have the latest cumulative PTF (or at least the minimum). If you have multiple WAS server instances and versions, you should try to consolidate those as much as possible and try to keep the number of JVM's down. A WAS server can run multiple apps - you don't need a server instance for every app. I've seen a dozen servers run one app a piece before - terrible (and expensive) waste of resources. When consolidating, consider using the built in application server as it is a little bit lighter than a full WAS JVM and appropriate for lightweight .war files with no distributed caching or EJBs.

For i/OS V5R4 you'll need to confirm the following is installed first.

• IBM Toolbox for Java (5722-JC1)
• IBM J2SE 5.0 32-bit JVM (5722-JVM) or IBM J2SE 6.0 32-bit JVM
• WebSphere Application Server – Express V7.0 or WebSphere Application Server – Express V6.1 (5722-WE2)
• WebSphere Application Server V6.1 (5733-W61) or WebSphere Application Server V7.0 (5733-W70)

For V6.1 you need

• IBM Toolbox for Java (5761-JC1)
• IBM J2SE 5.0 32-bit JVM (5761-JVM) or IBM J2SE 6.0 32-bit JVM
• WebSphere Application Server – Express V7.0 or WebSphere Application Server – Express V6.1 (5722-WE2)
• WebSphere Application Server V6.1 (5733-W61) or WebSphere Application Server V7.0 (5733-W70)

If you do not have capacity to run RTCp on the i/OS, you can run it on an AIX partition, or a Windows server. The build toolkit for i/OS MUST run on the i. Keep in mind you can run build toolkits on every operating system (except z/OS), and control them from the RTCp server.

If you get an immediate failure when issueing the restore licensed program command, your i is probably not using English as the default language. If so, you'll need to specify the LNG parameter on the RSTLICPGM command:

RSTLICPGM LICPGM(5724Z01) DEV(*SAVF) LNG(2924) SAVF(QGPL/B5724Z01)

This is because there are no language packs for RTCp currently.

When connecting to RTCp, make sure you have upgraded or installed the RTC 2.0 client. The RTCi 1.0 client will no longer work. The client versions must match up to the major/minor release levels, and preferably to the fix pack level.

If I run into other similar issues, I'll be sure and post them. The biggest issue out there is that the RTCp 2.0 InfoCenter is no where to be found, so you'll have to base your documentation on the WAS InfoCenter, the RTC 2.0 InfoCenter (for Windows and Linux), and the i/OS InfoCenter.

UPDATE:
The RTCp infocenter is at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/rtcihelp/v2r0/index.jsp.
Thanks to Kushal Mun for helping to find it. Its not exactly well linked.