Friday, November 27, 2009

25-11-2009 - HRUG meeting in Best (NL)

Eric Lopes Cardozo, co-leader HRUG, opened the Holland Rational User Group (HRUG) meeting held at the Philips Healthcare premises.

Roger Nutt, IBM Rational Technical Leader South West Europe, announced that a new IBM manager Rational for Benelux will be appointed today (26-11-2009). Next to the usual high level promotion of IBM’s slogan ‘innovation for a smarter planet’ he also announced that IBM will change their policy towards Business Partners in a more friendly way. IBM wants to make more use of the business partners because they now acknowledge that they have the real specialists, knowledge and capacity available to serve IBM’s customers. (Personally I see it as a kind of spreading of risk policy) Another example of change is the new close relationship with SAP. MCIF, IBM’s software development philosophy, was of course a theme for the day.

Ling Chen of CSC presented a head egg project which, due to hard labor, still became a success. Despite the need of continuous synchronization between Rose and RequisitePro related to the requirements, CSC was able to work successfully with the requirements and relations between requirements using a requirements traceability matrix (ReqPro). The use of SoDA is/was definitely not a success in this project!

Jos Jennekens (IBM) presented and demonstrated Rational Insight which is based on Cognos Technology and tailored for the Rational environment. The dashboards and reports generated are adjustable to the customers need. Next to that it will also support in the near future HP Quality Center and other ALM supporting non-IBM products. Rational Insight cannot be used outside of the ALM area and its not the idea that you use the Cognos features (available within Insight) yourself. Maybe Decision Centric a nice alternative here? Nice feature of the dashboard functions of Insight is that you can drill down by clicking on bars and tables.

Julian Holmes (UPMentors) gave a good presentation about Agile, how to go there, and the link to IBM’s MCIF and supporting tools. Besides the traditional arguments in favor for a change to Agile, Julian presented an important habit of people that definitely helps to sell Agile in your organization. Ikiwisi ….I know it when I see it. This typical human habit is very disturbing in a traditional (Waterfall) development process and very handy in an iterative development process!
From Julian’s perspective is that MCIF is in line with OpenUP which is a mix of SCRUM, DSDM, RUP, XP, and Agile modeling, which is not a bad idea. IBM’s Jazz and RTC (Rational Team Concert) platforms fully support this and other development models.

For me as director of Avelyn it was an inspiring day, but I missed the user stories and specific Rational related Tips and Tricks. I will certainly attend next time again!
If you are interested to join look here for joining HRUG.