This release integrates Rational Software Architect into the Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) through enhanced Design Management capabilities. This allows teams to easily manage design changes, collaborate on designs, establish traceability with requirements, understand the impact of a requirement or design change, and document designs.

This announcement covers an update to Rational Software Architect (Software Announcement 212-208, dated June 4, 2012 ) to add new Jazz-based Design Management V4.0 capabilities that complement the extensive design capability in the Rational Software Architect client.

Rational Software Architect Design Management capability makes it easy for teams to manage their designs, collaborate on designs with peers and stakeholders, and integrate software design into their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution.

These new and enhanced design management capabilities work with both Version 8.5 and Version 8.0.4.1 of the Rational Software Architect client and enable teams to:

• Reduce design time using the new design configuration management support that provides simplified change control for designs, and reduces the chances of change conflicts.
• Improve quality by collaborating on designs with peers and other stakeholders.
• Establish traceability between designs, requirements, change requests, test cases, and test plans; making it easier for stakeholders to quickly find the latest design related to their work.
• Know the impact of a design change or the impact of a requirement change on the design through a visual impact analysis.
• Keep an active repository or their designs allowing teams members to access the latest designs from either the Rational Software Architect client or using a web client.
• Quickly search designs from current and past projects to find reusable design components.
• Reduce the time required to meet regulatory and contractual requirements by automating the generation of designs documents based on templates or create live design documents as part of your project.
• Reduce administration time and costs with common user administration and lifecycle projects across Rational Team Concert™ , Rational Requirements Composer, Rational Quality Manager, and Rational Software Architect.

This update to Rational Software Architect adds new role-based offerings: Rational Software Architect Designer and Rational Software Architect Designer for WebSphere Software. It provides a complete design solution that includes the client authoring, validation, and transformation capabilities and the Jazz-based server design management capabilities.

Existing users of Rational Software Architect can add the Design Management capability through the Rational Software Architect Extensions for Design Management (previously named Rational Software Architect Design Manager).

A new Contributor role is added to Rational Software Architect that allows extended team members to collaborate on the software designs. This Contributor role also provides full access to work items, planning, reporting, and read access (view and comment) to requirements and test artifacts from Rational Requirements Composer and Rational Quality Manager.

The Rational Software Architect Design Reviewer role is withdrawn from market (Software Announcement 912-205, dated September 4, 2012 ) . Existing Rational Software Architect Design Reviewer users can continue to use these licenses with the new Design Management V4.0 server. New users should use the Rational Software Architect Contributor role for extended team members who need to collaborate on software designs.

For ordering, contact your IBM® representative, an IBM Business Partner, or IBM Americas Call Centers at 800-IBM-CALL (Reference: AE001).

For more information, see:

http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&appname=iSource&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS212-333