The IBM Rational product family provides a seamless integration of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) capabilities referred to as IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM). CLM provides a collaborative way for software delivery teams to unify multiple platforms and coordinate roles and activities across the core ALM disciplines of Change Management, Requirements Management, and Quality Management.

The core CLM solution integrates a corresponding set of products, including Rational Team Concert, Rational Requirements Composer, and Rational Quality Manager, to create a highly collaborative solution for software delivery. This solution can also be integrated with Rational Software Architect to extend the value of CLM to design management. IBM also maintains integrations bettween a number of its other ALM products, such as Rational ClearQuest.

While CLM is a very powerful solution, IBM realizes that customers already invested into other tools and technologies need to continue using them for the time being. These customers operate in highly diverse and heterogeneous, lifecycle environments, and there are a variety of reasons why tools already established in their environments are critical to their business. These tools often cannot simply be removed and replaced with new ones, but must coexist and interoperate with new tools that are brought into the environment.

It is for those customers that IBM offers the Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters. These software components connect Rational ALM products to select third-party tools to allow customers to continue using their existing lifecycle tools and still gain benefit from many capabilities found in the Rational CLM solution.

The key integration technology for the Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters is the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standard. OSLC provides a set of interfaces organized into a number of functional areas (domains) that allow lifecycle tools stemming from many sources to link and trace data being managed by those tools. OSLC is now the Rational standard for integration implementation and is the basis for the Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters Standard Edition.

Some customers have invested heavily into customizations of their current tools, that include specialized reporting and workflows. These customizations may need to be preserved as users integrate across practitioner roles and their respective tools. The Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters Tasktop Edition uses additional integration methods that supplement OSLC to support alternative use cases and workflow environments in a way that minimizes the impact integration may have for customers in these situations.

New in Version 1.1.1

Improvements to existing adapters and new integrations to additional third-party tools include:

• New integrations to Rally and Serena Business Manager
• Improvements to the existing integrations with Rational Requirements Composer that help users determine what information to synchronize, as well as support for the IBM recommended authentication configuration
• Capability to create and manage integration templates that apply to multiple large-scale projects improves enterprise manageability
• A new set of APIs and associated Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Added support for Gerrit v.2.6 in Git adapter and for Atlassian JIRA v.6
• Usability improvements to JIRA and HP ALM adapters

Find out more here.