In this interview from RSC 2009, I talk with IBM’s Mike O’Rourke, who you may remember from last year’s RSDC series. We discuss this year’s RSC focus on reporting, metrics, dashboards, etc. vs. “low-level” developer tools. As Mike says, this solves a problem where people are “tracking activity in a tool, but not across a whole life-cycle [of software].” Embodying this is the the Insight tool that tracks a requirement across the life-cycle of development, QA, deployment, and so on.
We also discuss how these tools fit in with best practices and establishes methodologies of companies. How do you get a development organization to the point of maturity where they can even start to track how well they’re doing? Mike spends discusses how he does this across the projects he overseas in the Rational portfolio, and maps it back to the generalized case. This also leads into a discussion of the recently released MCIF and how the process therein is hooked into the tooling and reporting in development. I then ask Mike about the team and organization size that Insight, MCIF, and other products work well with.
Shifting gears slightly, I ask Mike to tell us about the past year’s efforts to incorporate the Telelogic tools into the Rational portfolio. Part of this is the ongoing effort to have Rational products built on-top of Jazz, so Mike goes over the road-map for those transitions.
We wrap up with a discussion of the issues that Rational has encountered in moving some of their products to the cloud. I ask Mike for some lessons learned that might be helpful to others doing the same. One interesting practice Mike mentions is getting previews out there to enable richer customer/development feedback on the product, rather than waiting for the 12-18 month big-bang feedback cycle.
Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored these videos.
Recent Comments