Rational Team Concert

Rational Team Concert

Developer(s)	Rational Software
Initial release	June 2008
Stable release	6.0.2 (April 25, 2016) [±]
Preview release	Non [±]
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

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

Overview

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

Rational Team Concert is built on a client-server architecture. Software development teams use it to track 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^[1]
• Git^[2]
• Rational ClearCase
• Rational ClearQuest
• JIRA
• Rational Quality Manager
• Rational Focal Point
• Rational System Architect
• HP Quality Center
• Rational Build Forge
• Hudson
• Jenkins
• CruiseControl
• Maven

Rational Team Concert presents an Eclipse-based client interface, a Microsoft Visual Studio client interface, and a Web interface. Additionally, since version 4.0 it provides a windows shell integration within Windows Explorer for source control of files within the Rational Team Concert repository. The client interfaces provide an integrated development environment that developers use to build and deliver artifacts. Users can access 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 defect reports and enhancement requests. The Jazz.net community site also includes articles, forums, wikis, blogs, current documentation, and other troubleshooting and support resources for 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. IBM prices licenses according to the number of users and the actions these users are allowed to perform. However, IBM provides free licenses to qualified open source projects, academic users (research and classroom), and small commercial teams up to 10 users.

For all other purposes, IBM offers different client access licenses, which every client that connects to the Rational Team Concert Server needs. These client access licenses are available in different types—Authorized, Floating, Term, and Token. Each license type provides slightly different rights and prices to meet the demands of various size customers:

• An Authorized license is based on physical individual users. Each user must have a license, which they cannot share with other users.
• A Floating license is based on the total number of users who access the software at any time. This license can be shared across the company worldwide.
• A Term license limits usage right to a fixed term of 1 year, and therefore is cheaper than a comparable authorized/floating license.
• A Token license is like a Term license that entitles a company to use several IBM Rational products up to a maximum based on the number of tokens the company has purchased. Usage rights are limited to the contract duration, and different Rational applications consume different numbers of tokens. This license model can be attractive in terms of flexibility and internal accounting, since IBM bills all costs as services for the company, so the company doesn't have to deal with amortization accounting rules.

IBM subdivides these client access licenses into user roles—such as developer, contributor and stakeholder. A developer CAL (authorized, floating, term, token) allows full access to the product for every function. A contributor CAL provides access mainly to everything not related to source code. The stakeholder CAL further reduces accessible functions 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.

References

1. https://jazz.net/help-dev/clm/index.jsp?re=1&topic=/com.ibm.team.scm.svn.doc/topics/c_intro.html&scope=null
2. https://jazz.net/library/article/1423

External links

• Knowledge Center for Rational Team Concert
• Product page for Rational Team Concert
• IBM developerWorks page for Rational Team Concert
• Rational Team Concert Consultants and Resources
• Jazz.net development site for Rational Team Concert
• IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials Book on Amazon