Software Development Management

Software development management is the ability to track source code as it goes through the various stages of development from requirements gathering, testing, to release. Software requirements, plans and technical changes in a project, combined with the eminent interdependent and repetitive nature of the software development process, can make management chaotic for project managers and increase software quality risks.

Reporting is a business attribute of project administration for software development. Metrics, summaries, and contextual reports provide views and insight into the status of a project and help bring projects to successful completion IBM Rational ClearQuest, a comprehensive flexible change management system suitable for multiple process management, provides change tracking, process automation, reporting, traceability, and control of the software development lifecycle. Software development teams use Rational ClearQuest to successfully manage change in their development environments and throughout the software development cycle.

Version 7.1 of Rational ClearQuest provides a new, flexible reporting mechanism based on a data-pull reporting model, adding significant flexibility over the traditional data-push model, so that individual team members can gain real-time visibility into development activities. Data is pulled from Rational ClearQuest via the supplied ClearQuest ODA JDBC driver and presented in the standard reports shipped with ClearQuest 7.1 that are based on the Open Source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT), a project of the Eclipse Foundation.

BIRT is an Open Source reporting system for web applications, especially those based on Java and J2EE. Actuate founded and co-leads the BIRT project, while IBM is also an active participant, with representation on the Project Management Committee and a number of developers contributing code.

The BIRT project brings Rich Information Application capabilities as well as interactivity to the web-based reporting of structured data. As a result, it is the Open Source Business Intelligence offering with the most momentum, with more than 6.5 million downloads through 2008. BIRT consists of a comprehensive report development environment, reporting engine and powerful skill-specific tools for creating rich, interactive reports for client and web applications in a variety of formats. Rational has implemented these technologies as he basis of the new built-in reporting solution within.