Yesterday, I was in the AZRUG where they had a presentation for IBM Rational Build Forge software. First off, I have to thank the organizers for the pizza and the location. It was very convenient to be there and spend two hours. Just a disclaimer, this is not a sales pitch for the Rational buildforge tool but was really impressed and wanted to highlight the features and believe me, the only thing they did was to give a soda and pizza and that is not enough to bribe me for the sales pitch. The product speaks for itself.
How many times did you wonder if only they had a tool that can simulate your code in a production situation and you will not have any surprises when it is released to production? Well there seems to be solution or close to it in the Rational Build forge software. This software is a tool that sits on top of your development, test and release management system and you can simulate the situation and there will not be any problems during the release. I had nightmares in this regard because you would have completed your sandbox testing and there are no problems but when the release engineer releases to the test environment, you would see that some setup information was missed, and the application is not working and you would know about it from your boss after two days and he is angry. Then you verify the code and see that one of the release setup information was not setup properly and you go and fix it. You may not have such problems going forward if you implement the Build forge which eliminates such issues by having common platform across various environments.
The presentation started with features of the product. This was the first time I have seen a software that spans all aspects of the SDLC and yet acts as a thin client on top of the various enterprise environments. It seems to be a neat tool that can solve multitude of problems in one stroke. The developers can simulate the build in their own boxes and then release for the deployment and the release engineer’s job is very simple and it wont take hours or days and it also sends out the email notifications to the appropriate group based on the setup of steps. It has the capability for compiling the build suitable for multiple os platforms. It has api and adapters that come which can integrate with Clearquest/Clearcase. I asked about the release management with Remedy and they said that it is possible to call an api to trigger the release based on the Remedy change ticket. I was impressed. Although I did not get to do the hands on, the presentation was able to convince that it could add efficiencies to any type of software development cycle followed by the enterprises. They presented that some companies had 100% efficiency after implementing their suite of Build Forge, I am still skeptical to accept it but it may be true. The user interface is clunky but I would take it for ease of life. Overall it would be something that is a must for the enterprises with unpredictable release processes.