Using IBM Rational Team concert V2 to manage the Scrum project, part 3rd

Overview

Before you start

Before you start using Ibm®rational®team concert™ for scrum, you want to make sure that you have a transparent understanding of the basics of scrum and understand terms such as Product Backlog, Story Points, and so on. A brief introduction to Scrum project management is at the beginning of "creating projects, teams, and plans" in the first part of this series.

About this series

The breadth of Ibm®rational team concert™ collaboration capabilities makes it a very specific and challenging task to quickly understand and use it. This series of articles can help the Rational Team concert beginners, providing an opportunity to use it to improve the capabilities of the teams.

The first section describes the content of "creating projects, teams, and plans," and the second section provides further information on planning and managing sprints.

About this tutorial

Most of the time, scrum teams have been using Rational Team concert to plan and track their work progress. It provides some UI options. For example, a developer might prefer some client, such as Eclipse or microsoft®visual Studio. Many other stakeholders do not want to install other software on their systems, so they prefer to use the web version. With the V2 version, the ibm®rational®jazz™ and Rational team concert teams deliver dynamic improvements to their WEB interface, which provides all the features needed for daily work. The Eclipse interface is described in the first part of this series, "creating projects, teams, and plans."

Goal

This topic provides a real-time guide on how to use the Rational Team concert Web interface only, not the Eclipse version, to create and manage a Scrum project.

Prerequisite conditions

To fully perform all the steps in this topic, you will need a Jazz server, version 1.0.0.2, with the Rational Team Concert feature installed. For some steps, you also need administrator permissions on the server. If you want more detail information, you can view jazz.net.

System Requirements

This article uses the Rational Team concert 2.0.0.2 Standard Edition, which is downloaded from jazz.net, and is installed on a local system that already has the Apache TOMCAT server and Apache Derby database installed using a standard configuration. You must have a server license agreement, with at least seven developer license agreements installed, and full Administrator privileges to perform all the actions described in this article. Your Jazz server must also be installed at the suffix Level 2 (for example, 1.0.0.2), and you must use the Scrum templates provided by the Rational Team concert 2.0.0.2. If you are using an earlier version of Rational Team concert, then some things may not be the same or impossible.

To follow this guide, you may be using the Express-c download version of the Rational team concert, which contains all the things you need, including 10 free developer license agreements, and the easy to follow guidelines for server and client installations. The wiki.net on jazz.net shows a coordination matrix that demonstrates what client software can be used with a specific ibm®rational®jazz™team Server version.

Brief introduction

In earlier articles in this series, we discussed how to use the Eclipse based client interface to work with Rational Team concert, but this article focuses on the Web interface. This is useful for project stakeholders who do not want to install clients for tools, and for those who are far from their own offices and can only connect to the network through a browser.

With the Rational Team Concert version 2.0, the Web interface has been improved, so now it almost provides the full functionality of the Rational Team Concert for Agile Development. In the past, many features were available only by using the client interface. With version 2.0, only the work item categories and some project configurations must be defined using the client interface.

Attention:

Throughout the text, we treat the Web interface (accessed using the browser) differently from the Client interface (Eclipse or Microsoft Visual Studio).

This article shows you how to create a tool and how to use the Rational Team concert 2.0.0.2 Web interface to create an initial project.

This article is based on the use case study that Mike Cohn discussed in his book called Agile Estimation and planning. It describes a small team that is developing a new computer game called "Havannah". This article shows you how to create a Rational team concert to reflect this group and project, and how the team creates the plan and adds work items to those plans.

Create Rational team concert repository and user

Before you perform the steps described in this article, you will need to install a Jazz team server (with the Rational Teams concert feature) and be able to use (view system requirements). This article assumes that you have installed your own Jazz server and started from scratch. If this is not the case, then what you actually experience may be different from what is described here.

Log on to the Jazz server

Verify that your Jazz server has been started.

Point your browser to the URI of the Jazz server.

When you use the installation version of a Jazz server on a local system, for example, the URI may be https://localhost:9443/jazz/.

Enter the user ID and the appropriate password.

The initial user ID for the newly installed Jazz server is admin, and the password is admin (two use case sensitive) unless you froze admin and activated a different administrator user ID during the creation process.

Attention:

Note that the "https" of the URI has a lowercase letter "s", which means that Jazz uses a secure connection. Depending on the browser, if you forget to add the lowercase s, something strange will happen. Also, note that the security license is assigned to you, and if you are using Firefox, you must accept the license.

The interface shown in Figure 1 may look slightly different depending on the browser you are using (view jazz.net to get a list of supported browsers).

Figure 1. Log on to the Jazz server