Rational Software Architect Design Manager

Break down engineering silos with collaborative design management

IBM® Rational® Software Architect Design Manager enables teams to share, collaborate and manage design information across the application development lifecycle.

Focus the extended team to turn concepts and ideas into products and revenue. Leverage Jazz technology to more effectively manage complexity, mitigate risk, and improve the overall quality, time, and agility of software planning, design, and delivery.

  • Built on the Jazz Platform, Rational Software Architect Design Manager enables teams to store, share and manage designs and models in a central location.
  • Collaborate on designs with stakeholders from other teams for design correctness, alignment with requirements, feasibility, and compliance to organizational standards.
  • Easily access information though a web client for extended stakeholders such as, customers, or contractors to facilitate team collaboration and an agile development process.
  • Search across multiple designs to quickly locate key information for easier review, analysis and reuse of existing design.
  • Develop in real time with text comments and graphically diagram mark ups view from desktop clients.
  • Automate design reviews with stakeholders to facilitate communication of requirements.
  • Create links to other designs and lifecycle data such as work items in Rational Team Concert via Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) to provide design traceability.
  • Analyze impact and dependencies with relationship diagram to visually explore relationships to other designs, design elements, and lifecycle data.
  • Keep informed with customizable dashboards providing live status of latest design activities.
  • Generate comprehensive documentation and reports using Rational Publishing Engine to automate documentation generation.
  • Author and publish designs with the Rational Software Architect family.
  • Supports Linux and Windows servers.
  • Design Manager and Design Reviewer roles available.

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ThemeDescriptionBenefit
Central Design Storage All designs for an organization or system can be stored and accessed from a central location. These designs can be searched, viewed, analyzed on the server from Rational Software Architect or Web client. The new Relationship diagram supports impact analysis and discovery of related design elements and resources. Improve communication and increase team knowledge through an enterprise and system-wide repository with Web-based access.
Stakeholder Collaboration Stakeholders have self-serve access to design milestones, improving collaboration and quality of designs. Stakeholders can determine how their task relates to designs with traceable links to work items, requirements and test cases. Improve quality by enabling the extended team to easily access and review designs and trace analysis.
Keep stakeholders informed on how their work relates to designs
Design Reviews Designers automate reviews, specifying which designs and stakeholders participate. Stakeholders can view the design and attach comments and mark-up via the Web or rich client. Design reviews can be linked to Rational Team Concert work items for planning and tracking. Speed up decision-making by keeping people informed as decisions are made. Improve quality by ensuring that the extended team has direct input into updates and corrections. Automate the design review process.
Multi-Discipline Document generation and reporting Access design information through open interfaces for document generation and reporting by tools like Rational Publishing Engine.
Documents can show the impact of design changes on other lifecycle resources leveraging the OSLC linking data.
Reports can include comments and details from design reviews.		 Easily create comprehensive documentation for specifications, communication, compliance and auditing. Help prove compliance by including OSLC link information and design review information.

Based on the Jazz platform, Rational Software Architect Design Manager is available in two roles to provide different team members the relevant capabilities for their use.

  • Rational Software Architect Design Manager role is designed for team members who are using IBM Rational Software Architect to create and modify designs and need to update those designs on the Design Management server, create snapshots, and to conduct design reviews.
  • Rational Software Architect Design Manager Reviewer is for stakeholders who need to collaborate, review, and comment on designs but do not create or modify the designs directly. Stakeholders can use a web browser to review and make comments on the actual designs so that the architect or systems engineer can easily collect the feedback without generating a separate artifact for everyone to review.


Role / LicenseRSA Design ReviewerRSA Design Manager
Audience For extended team members who need to access and collaborate on models and designs For design practitioners using RSA to create models and designs
View and search designs Yes Yes
Attach comments and markup Yes Yes
View designs in dependency diagram Yes Yes
View and create design links Yes Yes
Dashboards Yes Yes
Import Rational Software Architect designs   Yes
Schedule import from SCM   Yes
Setup design reviews
Yes
Create design baselines   Yes

FeatureDescriptionBenefits
View and search designs Teams can search through all of an organization's designs based on keywords. The search can include designs, design elements, attributes, descriptions, and meta-data information Improves collaboration and reuse within and across project teams.
Attach comments and markup Team members can view the design and provide feedback by attaching comments and marking-up designs via the Web or rich client. Save time, improves communication and improves overall quality of the designs by making it easy for all stakeholders to provide feedback.
View designs in dependency diagram Team members can view model resources in a tree-like structure, where models can be expanded and collapsed in a hierarchical manner Save time and improve overall quality with the ability to understand the effects of change through impact analysis and discovery of related design elements and resources.
View and create design links Team members can link from design elements to other designs and lifecycle artifacts (architecture management, requirements management, change management, and quality management) through open services for lifecycle collaboration (OSLC). Improves quality and provides the assurance that designs cover all the stated requirements, and that the model elements are all covered by tests and the status of those tests.
Dashboards Provides team members a live view to follow design management activities through a web dashboard that is integrated with other Jazz based lifecycle management products. Helps everyone easily monitor, scorecard, and collaborate on projects and address problems
Import Rational Software Architect designs Designs can be imported directly from file system Enables easy import of models into RSA Design Manager
Schedule import from SCM Rational Software Architect models can be scheduled to be imported from the SCM or file system periodically Ensures the latest view of the design is published.
Setup design reviews Designers automate reviews, specifying which designs and stakeholders participate. Design reviews can be linked to Rational Team Concert work items for planning and tracking Speed up decision-making by keeping people informed as decisions are made. Improve quality by ensuring that the extended team has direct input into updates and corrections. Automate the design review process
Create design baselines Designers can take a snapshot of the designs published on the repository and store them for both reviewers or designers to view Simplifies the design review process by ensuring team members are synchronized in reviewing the same snapshot of the design, and to allow team members to easily go back and reference to ensure comments and markups are addressed in future baselines.

Rational Software Architect Design Manager Server
Operating systemSoftwareHardware
  • Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x86-32
  • Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition x86-64
  • Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition x86-32
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition x86-64
  • Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition x86-32
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10.0 (x86-32 and x86-64)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.0 Advanced Platform (x86-32 and x86-64)

Application Servers

  • WebSphere Application Server 7.0.0.9 and future fix packs
  • Apache Tomcat 5.5 and future fix packs

Databases

  • DB2 Enterprise Server Edition 9.7 and future fix packs
  • DB2Workgroup Server Edition 9.7, and future fix packs
  • Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 1 and future fix packs
  • IBM Derby SDK 10.5 and future fix packs
  • Disk space: The amount of disk space required depends on the amount of information stored in the server. 80 GB or more of disk space is recommended. Swap space equal to twice the physical memory (recommended). An additional 1 GB of disk space and 500 MB for temporary space is required for installation.
  • Display: A display monitor with at least 1024 x 768 color resolution using 256 colors.
  • Memory: At least 2 GB RAM (4-8 GB recommended). More memory improves performance; the minimum memory depends on the number of concurrent users, the amount of data being requested, and the size of the database.
  • Processor: Server environments - The server requires the following hardware: A 2-core to 4-core CPU

The above system requirements for the Rational Software Architect Design Manager server software are a general guide only. For the detailed client software requirements, please read the release notes


Rational Software Architect Design Manager Clients
Web BrowsersClients
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 and future fix packs
  • Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and future fix packs
  • Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and future fix packs
  • Rational Software Architect 8.0.1
  • Rational Software Architect 8.0.2
  • Rational Software Architect 8.0.3
  • Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software 8.0.1
  • Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software 8.0.2
  • Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software 8.0.3

The above system requirements for the RTC Client software are a general guide only. For the detailed client software requirements, please read this article.

Application Lifecycle Management

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