IBM Rational software podcast series

Communication Service Providers face many challenges in defining, building, and deploying complex software-based systems. IBM Rational telecom solutions and tools are used successfully by various organizations within communications service providers to address their unique challenges in the definition of their products and in the construction and delivery of the software required by such systems. Speakers, Glenn Hughes and Kimberly Gist.

Obtaining feedback from users of Mobile apps is critical to determining the quality of the apps. But what do you do with the feedback? The most successful organizations leverage automation to rapidly respond to that feedback and deliver mobile apps that are truly engaging. This podcast explores the value of new IBM capabilities to continuously integrate, test, deploy and release mobile apps, reducing cycle times to respond faster to feedback. Speakers, Derek D. Baron and Kimberly Gist.

As development support tools become better integrated, the similarities and, perhaps more importantly, differences between terminology and process are brought to light. With agile and other recent development paradigms, often one get confused with the importance of requirements and a tool to manage them. In this webcast, we examine the similarities and differences between requirements and the artifacts most commonly called Work Items; when a CM tool would be sufficient and when to use a RM tool in your project? Speakers, Jared Pulham and Kimberly Gist.

In this podcast, we discuss about how organizations can expand the value of requirements when they collaborate with colleagues from other disciplines. As the systems become complex, collaboration and a communication platform becomes very critical. Requirements, being the foundation stone, Systems Engineering organizations need to consider requirements driven development and quality management. Speakers, Morgan Brown, Vijay P Sankar, and Kimberly Gist.

The pressure to quickly deliver differentiated customer value through innovative software is driving IT to explore fundamental transformations in software delivery. IBM's Integrated Solution for System z Development can help you optimize your System z development processes and reduce costs. Join us to hear about the latest capabilities, which include automated code review, unit test and code coverage for mainframe applications. Speakers, Alisa Morse, Tim Feeney, and Kimberly Gist.

Communications service providers (CSPs) have a history of adopting agile methods in their development of software-intensive products. However, the adoption of these methods, especially when continuous integration is involved, are impeded with old approaches to the deployment of these solutions to test labs and, finally, to the running system. In addition, test labs are expensive to setup and run and their preparation and usage can be restricted and time consuming. As well, the ability to respond in a timely manner to requests from the operations group can be impacted. This can lead to issues with customer satisfaction and reduced ARPU. In this podcast, we will discuss some approaches that help with this situation. Speakers, Neil LeBlanc, Steven J. Weaver, and Kimberly Gist.

Manual processes and efforts to deliver software changes across an enterprise are notoriously risky, costly, and error-prone. New deployment models and tools have come into play that helps streamline collaboration between teams, standardize and automate repeatable tasks, thereby increasing deployment quality and repeatability while reducing risk and cost. Discover how this new generation of release, deployment, and provisioning tools helps you improve your processes today, while positioning you for an easy jump to next-generation systems management in the future, saving days or even weeks of effort for every deployment. Speakers, Francis Dumont, Maneesh Goyal, and Kimberly Gist.

Many agencies are adopting, or want to adopt Agile practices to drive faster delivery, higher quality, and improved collaboration. An iterative approach to software delivery allows for a constant evolution of requirements, driving refinements more frequently in the development process, ensuring timely delivery of critical software. Despite the benefits, agencies have adoption challenges unique to the government environment. Join this podcast to learn a few strategies your organization can leverage for successful agile adoption. Alan Brown, Richard Knaster and Kimberly Gist, speakers.

Dr. McCoy and the medical tricorder device from Star Trek is becoming reality. Entrepreneurs, start-ups, and traditional medical device manufacturers are leveraging the compute power, portability, and connectivity of Smartphones to create a new class of medical diagnostic devices. There's even an X Prize competition adding fuel to the market interest. This podcast discusses the regulatory compliance considerations and the key product development lifecycle practices that are needed to build Smartphone-based medical devices. Paridhi Verma, Harvey Wong and Martin Bakal, speakers.

Software development outsourcing efforts by Communications Service Providers can lead to difficulties in collaborating with their software supply chain to ensure requirements are well understood causing potential delays in product offering. IBM Rational's GADO offering can help govern the collaboration across this supply chain. Kimberly Gist and Charles Rivet, speakers.

Join us to hear about the new 9.0 versions of Rational Developer for i and Rational Developer for AIX and Linux. Learn what you need to know to get your modern tools NOW. Hear about the ADTS trade up program to save you money. Kimberly Gist and William T. (Bill) Smith, speakers.

For scrum teams to be productive, they need stories that are specified well enough that they can actually be implemented. Millard Ellingsworth describes an increasingly popular practice called "backlog grooming" and explains Rational Team Concert customizations that can help identify user stories that need grooming. This article requires Rational Team Concert version 4.0 or higher. Kimberly Gist and Millard Ellingsworth, speakers.

Requirements come in many shapes and sizes. They have demonstrated time and time again to improve the development time, quality and overall cost of a project. Projects that lack requirements quickly fall into many of the typical traps of common project failure. Listen to the podcast in where Bernard Coyne talks about how requirements improve the complete development life cycle along with the best practices of managing requirements effectively.

Diagnostic Grifols has adopted Agile practices while keeping development in compliance with regulations. In this podcast you will learn how Diagnostic Grifols has evolved its practices with the new AAMI's Technical Information Report (TIR45) which gives guidance on the use of Agile in medical device development; Diagnostic Grifols has attained significant gains in productivity with a simultaneously Agile and compliant approach; and how this type of approach could be used in other regulated industries as well. Keith Collyer and Paridhi Verma, speakers.

Agile development allows the developers to build products quicker. One issue that organizations have in migrating to Agile is understanding project completion and how to manage the different metrics across projects. Another issue is the metrics capture process for an Agile team becomes quite burdensome, if it isn't automated. Typical agile metrics are things like burndown and velocity. Mapping these concepts to traditional project status like percent complete and expected ship date can become onerous. Martin Bakal and Paridhi Verma, speakers.