IBM Rational Conference 2009 (NL)

2009-10-13 IBM Rational Conference 13-10-2009 in kaatsheuvel NL, a peronal review.

Complete day organized by IBM and dedicated to the Rational Development suite and philosphy 'Rational'.

The conference had 4 tracks.

The keynote by Martin Nally (CTO IBM Rational) was very interesting, he presented the complete suite from a management perspective and stressed that with Rational you have a complete infrastructure available from requirements to end of application lifecycle.

Alan Brown (CTO IBM Rational Europe) talked about Agility and how it fits with the Rational suite. Very good overview, but forgot to mention the price of agility for the users. They have to pay as much as 4 times more (source Leen van Toor, Avelyn) time to spent on development projects in comparison to waterfall projects.

Alex van den Akker explained the 'new' Accelerate Value Program, the different levels of support offered by IBM.

Mark van Lint used the sheets of Amarican colleagues to give a quick overview of Rational Quality Management (RQM), especially the animations of the real products gave a nice feeling of the interactions between different products. The use of Cognos to collect statistical data and generate reports is integrated in RQM. If you pay a bigger price Cognos can be made available to collect and report as central datawarehouse in the complete Rational suite (Rational Insight).

Ralph Moonen as independend consultant working at TLS explained the benefits of Rational AppScan. This product generates different levels of warning signals for security leaks or weak spots, retrieved from inspection of the source code. Ralph stated that after own manual investigation of every signal the external development team was informed and asked to fix the problem. His work is made easy using Rational Appscan.

Remco Kwinkelenberg explained the model based testing approach in a Rational Quality Management environment. Using the tool 'Test designer' of Smartesting you are able to generate (!) testcases for manual or testscripts for automated testing by Rational Functional Tester. Interesting stuff.

Topic 'Total Test Quality' presented by Erik Jansen of IBM Global Services presented an interesting story about the changes in the test-market. Related to that he presented 2 additional Services which can be provided by IBM Global Services if you are using the rational Suite. (one of them: Test Process Otimized Workbench)

John Straathof of Zyntax Consulting demonstrated the use of Rational in a SAP environment, but it could be any other application environment. message was that the rational suite does its work also for SAP environments.

Oce presented the model driven development approach for development of their industrial automation chellenges for the inside of their complex top range printers (to 250 pages per minute (!)) by reusing lots of software components thex could bring down the development effort per printer to 25% of the normal time required!

Next to the persentations I met several intersting people which makes it possible for me personaly to grow and for Avelyn to spread the knowledge of Flye which is a perfect add-on for Rational Functional Tester www.avelyn.nl . Flye will be released in 1Q 2010.

The accomodation and especially the food was perfect. Droomvlucht was as usual very nice....