Software delivery, governance on tap at Rational Conference Increasingly, enterprise app dev projects span the globe. To govern such sprawling collaborations, IBM is rolling out 12 products developed by its Rational Software division.IBM claims that its new ALM (application lifecycle management) offerings, collectively dubbed the Rational Software Development Platform, will make it easier to wrangle global software supply chains. Eleven of the products are upgraded versions of previous offerings; the 12th, a build and release process management package, came with the acquisition of BuildForge last month. Automation is the overriding theme — of test management, the software build and release process, and global collaboration, including support for multiple languages in the new IBM Rational ClearQuest 7 package, said Roger Oberg, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM Rational.The idea is to exercise greater control over roles, responsibilities, decision making, and measurement for software development so that it can be treated as a business process. “The business process of software and systems development is something that needs governing,” Oberg said. The linchpin in the platform is IBM Rational ClearQuest 7, which delivers workflow and activity management that can trace an asset through the development lifecycle and assist with compliance through audit reporting. A single repository is featured for maintaining data about tests, builds, and all parts of the ALM lifecycle. A workflow engine is used to develop custom workflows that reflect processes, Oberg said.According to IBM, ClearQuest will sell for $1,620 for an authorized user license that includes 12 months of support.The BuildForge product, meanwhile, furnishes information about software builds and links to ClearQuest 7 and another product in the platform, Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7. “No one has [the] capabilities that BuildForge provides for managing automated builds,” Oberg said. Pricing for BuildForge is not final. IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager costs $1,100 for a user license and 12 months of support, IBM said.The new platform can trace requirements that are tied to regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, which will improve the ability of companies to comply with those regulations, according to Oberg.Geographically distributed development in a global economy has put a premium on coordination of development teams, said Melinda Ballou, an analyst at IDC. “In terms of the global pressures for offshoring and outsourcing and distributed development that we see as ongoing, the new releases from IBM Rational are specifically targeted at [creating] better coordination between these distributed teams,” Ballou said.The addition of build management through the BuildForge acquisition is critical, Ballou added.“Increasingly, we see the need for organizations to actually incorporate that as part of the extended piece of change management and final production releases for software. Obviously, the production builds are the artifacts that users see,” Ballou said. IBM’s Rational products are set to ship this month. Software Development