It isn’t surprising that AI and connected devices have made product engineering harder. So have more complex development requirements and things like increased testing and seemingly endless lines of code.
It’s all why IBM went back to the drawing board for its IBM Continuous Engineering solution earlier this year, beginning with a new name. Retitled IBM® Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) for the version 6.0.6.1 release, the “new” solution included several quality-oriented fixes and scale improvements along with enhancements in each of the ELM applications. IBM additionally renamed these underlying application,s to more clearly reflect their capabilities and value proposition. (The CE/CLM products were renamed in version 7.0.)
Beyond the name changes, credit IBM ELM for intensifying its focus on the aspects of development that help product and software engineering teams the most. To manage requirements, workflow, testing, compliance, reporting and the like — and especially to speed time-to-market — IBM ELM is one of the most complete suites of software development tools in the industry right now.
IBM ELM Managed Services by ClearObject
In tandem with IBM’s ELM effort, IBM worked with ClearObject to create a cloud-based version called IBM ELM Managed Services by ClearObject, which is now available.
Of note is that, unlike engineering lifecycle management offerings from other OEMs, IBM has structured a complete integration layer in the managed IBM ELM solution that ClearObject offers. This results in two substantive benefits.
First, with end-to-end integration between core engineering functions for Requirements, Test, Workflow Management, and Systems Design (MBSE), product engineering teams get a quality requirements management configuration and solid architecture managed across the lifecycle of enterprise scale. And second, as Software as a Service (SaaS), ClearObject’s IBM ELM managed services environment allows entire engineering organizations to participate globally and evaluate developed concepts without having to dedicate their own IT resources.
All in all, ClearObject’s IBM ELM managed services let product engineering leaders limit risk, control costs and drive innovation. Their teams can also focus 100% on developing products and not on managing the development process itself.
Quality and scalability improvements across the IBM ELM solution
This comes from IBM’s Amy Silberbauer and the same blog post we linked to earlier for the IBM ELM 6.0.6.1 release. Amy is IBM’s Executive IT Specialist, Watson IoT Engineering Offering Management, and these are the enhancements she points out.
Enterprise Quality of Service Highlights
Improvements in the quality and scale of the ELM (CE) solution include:
- RDNG stability in large-scale environments
- Reliability of reporting with versioned data in configuration-aware environments
- Reliability of email notifications in cases where there is a firewall between the SMTP server and the Jazz Team Server
- Ease of discovery and resolution of error conditions on administration pages
Global Configuration Management (GCM)
- Performance improvements when working with global configuration hierarchies consisting of hundreds or thousands of streams and baselines
IBM Engineering Requirements Management (RDNG)
- Performance improvements when working with hundreds of components
- Added support for multi-server deployments, greatly improving concurrent user and data scalability
- New timeouts on long-running queries that adversely affected server performance
- Added capability to archive uninteresting configurations to reduce index size and increase overall data scale
IBM Engineering Workflow Management (RTC)
- Faster work item editor load times when there are many saved tags
- Full-Text Searching is faster
- File caching with Apache Traffic Server for a better experience over wide-area networks
- Git automation to simplify registering large numbers of repositories
IBM Engineering Test Management (RQM)
- Optimized database queries that are resource intensive
- Added a new REST API to allow deleting test results from QM database
IBM Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody
- Improved performance when refreshing tables, opening diagrams and interacting with large models
- Less performance impact on DOORS or RDNG when loading or refreshing remote requirements (Rhapsody and RMM)
- Efficiency improvements when managing and working with large numbers of remote requirements
IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization (JRS)
- Easier access to logs for problem identification and resolution
- Improved reliability of data in the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) data source through validation of indices against Tracked Resource Set (TRS) feeds
- More comprehensive RTC data published to the LQE data source
Going beyond managed services for IBM ELM
ClearObject provides several additional benefits with its IBM ELM managed services. Among them:
ClearObject’s relationship with IBM support. With secure, direct access (via ClearObject) to the logs they need to diagnose your problem, IBM Support knows the architecture of your deployment and gets to your fix much faster.
Automated patching and upgrades. Based on hundreds of successful projects for patching and upgrades, our blend of experience and automation reduces errors, improves speed, and consistently results in positive support outcomes.
Product-specific monitoring to prevent issues. ClearObject monitors inside the product as well as external basics to perform prognostics based on pattern recognition well in advance — preventing issues before they occur. The knowledge we gain helps our entire IBM ELM customer community.
Extensive security. Get the security of a single-tenant virtual private cloud for deployment and to monitor cloud and user activity, all protected by a VPN tunnel.
Continuous research and best practices. ClearObject continually invests in research for automation, machine learning, and other features that streamline and enhance the IBM tool suite. By supporting organizations of all kinds, we also identify and implement best practices across many industries.
Contact us
ClearObject is both an IBM Gold Business Partner and the sole managed service provider for IBM SaaS globally. With our IBM ELM Managed Services offering, we’re able to bring knowledge and responsiveness together in the form of the IBM development process and IBM Support. The added advantage you get is working with a long-standing IBM partner — a single trusted source to administer your entire environment for engineering product development.
