Create custom reports using Birt and Rational Team concert, part 1th: Basic reports

About this article

This article is the first of three article series. The 2nd article deals with complex reports and fixed data sets.

Ibm®rational team concert™ can help software developers store and organize large amounts of information, including work plans and tasks, build and test, and source code and other files. With a repository of this size, visualization can become a problem. How do you get a high-level view of the project status tracked by the Rational team concert? The dashboard and work item queries provide a way to view this information, but for a more customizable view, Rational team concert supports Universal Eclipse Business information and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Reports upload reports directly to the WEB client.

Figure 1. Example report with a row

The Rational team concert contains more than 50 predefined reports that show information about work items, building and source control systems that you can access from the Web client's Reports entry. If these reports don't exactly show what you want to do, you can create your own customized reports.

You can use custom reports to specify and format information that you want to be extremely accurate. This article shows how to display specific information from the Rational Team concert repository in the form of a custom report.

People in your organization use the common Rational Team concert report in different ways:

When I need to include information from many different sources, I usually create a simple report instead of a work item query. The dashboard displays multiple queries in this way, but the report provides more flexibility.

Some regions use reports as part of the agenda of the meeting. In this example, the report shows the work items that need to be discussed (for example, an obstacle issue or the latest update), and the list guides the meeting.

We also use reports to track the long-term progress of software products. In this case, the report obtains information from all the different areas that are associated with the product and shows how the product will evolve towards its long-term goals.

Goal

The first of three articles in this series. Subsequent articles in this series discuss more advanced applications of the Rational Team concert and BIRT reports.

This article contains the following topics:

Install and configure the Rational team concert server and client and BIRT report editing tools

Get information from the Rational Team concert repository into a simple BIRT report

Upload report templates to the Rational Team concert server and create reports from these templates