IBM Releases Version 7 of its Engineering Lifecycle Management Solution

IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM), formally known as Collaborative Lifecycle Management (Rational) solution has been a staple in the application lifecycle management (ALM) landscape, alongside Broadcom (acquired Rally’s Agile Central) and Micro Focus (acquired HP’s ALM and Quality Center). ELM is a collection of individual requirements, development, testing, and work management products to enable and orchestrate the analysis and management of software changes and feature requests from intake to deployment in a collaborative manner. End users can acquire and implement each IBM product individually to supplement gaps within their existing ALM landscape if they are not interested in adopting the entire solution.

IBM is not backing down on its ALM investment as it recently released v7.0 of its ELM solution. Many new and enhanced features were added across the ELM products to improve team productivity, system and product analysis, and overall performance of the solution, such as:

• IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management v7.0 – Automatic data type mapping simplifies ReqIF-based requirements collaboration; improved traceability between DOORS 9.7.1 and versioned tests, models, and requirements.
• IBM Engineering Test Management v7.0 – Testers can run offline a complete test suite or multiple test cases execution records at once and can set up a clustered environment to host a Jazz Team Server and multiple Quality Management (QM) WebSphere Liberty nodes to scale this product’s deployment.
• IBM Engineering Requirements Management – DOORS Next v7.0 – Tag imported data so filters can be used to manage missing requirements specifications and data in a data exchange with external parties to improve visibility for an audit trail.
• IBM Engineering Workflow Management (EWM) v7.0 – Simplify support for Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) 4.6 with two out-of-the-box process templates, Essential SAFe 4.6 and Full SAFe 4.6.
• Rhapsody Model Manager v7.0 and Rhapsody v9.0 – Manage models, code, and work items on the same EWM server and in the same components, development streams, and snapshots/baselines to reduce the number of servers that need to be managed and maintained and reduce the complexity of having to create and manage project relationships across two different servers.
• IBM Engineering Reporting v7.0 – Use the Report Builder guided interface to build reports about link validity, and the redesigned configuration picker improves the scalability and performance better than the previous picker.

Source: Application Lifecycle Management at SoftwareReviews, Accessed April 13, 2020

Our Take

IBM’s Engineering Lifecycle Management solution gives organizations the capability to manage their product delivery pipeline though a single, centralized platform. The tight integration among ELM and other IBM products makes it an attractive option for those looking to invest in other IBM solutions. Much like the other big ALM players, ELM integration with third-party tools is restricted to IBM’s partners, which can be a detractor for users who are looking for out-of-the-box plug-ins. Know what is required to deliver and support your products first and then see how IBM ELM can enable, streamline, and automate it.

Want to Know More?

Learn more about ALM solutions, see our:

• Choose the Right ALM Solutions to Manage Product Delivery – Understand what ALM is and how it can be used to improve software product delivery.
• SoftwareReviews: Application Lifecycle Management Category – See what organizations are saying about the use of ALM solutions.