IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) Reviews - Page 20

functionality and ease of use, tons of features Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

resources usability is high and exceeding Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Modules section is very goos and also collections Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

suspicion profiles is having issues and needs improvement Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Rational Team Concert, or RTC for short, works best as a full SDLC development, test management, and release management suite. When you have your software architecture and project work management integrated into it, and have tasks assigned and processed the way they should, it really gives the management and end-users great visibility of their projects and where they are in their various phases. However to do that requires that EVERYONE learn and use RTC fully. And that is just way too high a barrier to entry for many places to surmount as they need to continue DOING rather than learning, which is admittedly inefficient and stupid and leads to bad practice becoming ingrained in an organization and thus institutionalized. However, until senior management grants enough time for people to learn to RTC fully as it should be, which is the role of the braver middle managers to push, i.e. be real leaders instead of yes-men goons for the seniors, it a such an easy set of tools to misuse, abuse, waste the potential of, and otherwise turn it into a mediocre partial solution as part of your kit for the SDLC.

That said, the following things are good:

Strong admin controls and powerful automation capabilities in concert (no pun intended) with tools like UrbanCoder for deploying releases.

Good universal work item reference system. Everything can always be found using these, unlike other systems that will use different (i.e. non-universal) references for different things, confusingly enough.

Great for managing work-streams and giving your client/business stake-holders views of your progress via easily managed browser-accessible dashboards.

Relatively easy to manage the forked development of existing stable releases by different teams, or even within the same team if need be for experimental bifurcated development.

Everyone in the SDLC has a role in RTC. Truly everyone. This makes access really nice to control. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The admin controls are powerful but there is a steep learning curve and you WILL need support from IBM to help you there. It's just too damn powerful to manage easily at the start if you're new to it as an admin.

The concept of the SDLC in RTC is very good and plainly obvious but if you're bringing this tool into an existing organization, your devs, testers, etc. will NOT accept it readily. You MUST ensure that they have adequate time to be trained with it, have sessions to just experiment and be able to ask questions, and offer unlimited retraining sessions. Seriously. Make the RTC admins own that, because ultimately that will save YOU time and frustration as an admin as people will start learning the RTC method and become less and less likely to cause huge alarms and panics in the last hours before a deployment is scheduled. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

RTC is great for organizing work using agile principles. It's better organised than some other tool I've used. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are widgets that can be used to summarize data. What I don't like is the inability to write my own query for the widgets - I'm stuck with whatever data choices someone else already picked for me. Also, there's a prioritized list view that uses a number to rank. I'm not able to create a query that will give me this rank number. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The structure of of the software is what I like best. It is very clear how to go look for a requirement by module. The search tool is user friendly as well. I also like the way you can be detailed in the way you organize your modules so that it is clear how you are tracking your requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The one thing I can certainly say I do not like is that there is no MAC version available so I am forced to use this software on Parallels. Not that it is a bad thing, but it tends to be very slow, so it takes up time to do a small task. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The user friendliness of the software, doesn't take too much time to train in it's use! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is not much to dislike about this software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Once established, it is easy to manage and monitor requirements elicited and to analyze. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is a learning curve to getting used to the software Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is a lot of features to make sure you can get the data and reporting you need for your project. It has many options out of the box for a person to use and with configuration there is even more available. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Too complex for a normal team to use. There would need to be a person dedicated to its use and get training on it to get everything out of it. Installing the system is not easy and user reporting is not a mandatory feature. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It has an incredible amount of features. All the modules have a lot of power to a user. A person could stay in the app the whole time, no need to exit out to work on a diagram elsewhere or write an email. It is a one stop shop for managing your requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is not easy to install or configure. We had to hire a person to setup the application for us and they are still on standby when issues come up. We install it on site and the number of parts that need to be installed and setup properly took quite a bit of time for us. The system uses java a lot and we have found some of the heavy diagram based artifacts we have in the system can stall the use of for others. It is a lot of a system that is not meant for small groups without a dedicated administrator. It is very powerful and has many options but because of that some abilities require an expert to set them up for you, the notes for a user to operate it are not friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I liked its ease of use the best. The intuitive user interface made performing Scrum development a breeze. The task tracking and the ability for my IDE to use the My Work View made things much easier to keep track. In addition we had a small development team, so the fact that we were able to get 10 free licenses up front really helped us out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There isn't much to dislike, except for the fact that RTC is huge and there is a steep learning curve to grasp all of its capabilities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.