Here it is. Seems that RTC is even better than I thought... Among cool things mentioned, there are:
- Support for Agile methodology out of the box
- Original approach to SCM, based on the concept of "streams" (which are essentially branches)
- Advanced build system, automatically collecting all supporting artifacts, such as change sets, fixed defects, etc.
- A lot of great documentation (like Getting Started with Jazz Source Control)
What I can add from my personal experience, is that the Major Huge Advantage of RTC is that you get all these features integrated altogether out of the box. Installed it today on Windows 2003 Server - it took just 15 minutes (!) to install and configure a complete team collaboration solution. It normally takes few days to configure something like Trac + Subversion + Hudson, and even longer if you'd like to replace Trac with Redmine or Bugzilla on Linux, etc.
Hudson at Trac must be pains to configure I take it. Took me about 1-2 hours to get Subversion + Jira + GreenHopper and CCNET up and running.
ReplyDeleteHowever that mix lacks a bit of the advantage that RTC claims to have, but I was looking for a more in depth review of RTC since we are at a point of choosing to go down that path.
Hello Jeme,
ReplyDeleteactually they are progressing really rapidly with each new version of RTC. IBM released version 2 since I wrote that post, and today you can download even the release candidate for 3.0! As usual you can find a lot of useful information on their official website (see http://jazz.net/projects/rational-team-concert/). I like "What's new" section - it gives good understanding of RTC progress.
At the same time I must confess that we faced numerous issues with using the latest version of RTC. First of all, it took us two weeks to install the server on our AS/400 box. Some web interface features were not working and looked buggy. We had to upgrade our Rational IDEs to the latest versions as well, as RTC clients don't maintain backward compatibility for version 1.0. I think there were some other (minor) issues with that, but at the end of the day we were pretty satisfied with the results.