Remain Taps JIRA to Heighten Change Management Collaboration

December 2, 2015 Dan Burger

Controlling the chaos of collaboration from an application development perspective has proved to be a valuable asset for many IBM midrange customers. Better code, with the bugs worked out before it goes into production, saves time and money compared to debugging and redesigning after the fact. The value goes beyond writing code because collaboration applies to many business oriented teams and numerous end users who are effected sometimes for the better and other times for the worse.

Project tracking comes in many flavors, so Remain Software is integrating its application lifecycle management tool, TD/OMS, with multiple popular options. Its latest integration efforts involve JIRA, a proprietary workflow application developed by Atlassian that manages the communication and task flow among team members.

The integration of Remain’s TD/OMS and JIRA combines JIRA’s agile management functions with the software development workflow and application lifecycle management functionality of TD/OMS. The goal is creating higher quality code and more stable applications than either of those tools could accomplish on their own.

To collaborate or not to collaborate is the question. The power of collaboration is tied to a well-managed workflow and is an unquestioned certainty in modern software development, says Marco Kok, managing director at Remain Software.

“This is the reason why we decided to integrate our application lifecycle management tool with collaboration solutions, such as JIRA. We let the customer choose the best option for their IT department and the most suitable software for their specific way of working and projects,” Kok says in a press release announcing the integration.

More is better when it comes to options, even though Remain has software with many of the same capabilities as JIRA. Remain calls its JIRA-like tool Gravity and it is designed to integrate with TD/OMS, a product used in IBM i development environments around the world. TD/OMS is also designed to integrate with IBM Rational Team Concert, which provides yet another option for communication and collaboration with multiple-platform development environments as well as extensive project management scope.

Any of these integration options allows a person to manage the task-related source code within the TD/OMS repository while benefiting from the strength of the IBM i in combination with Java and/or RPG best practices and users’ established workflows. IBM i developers and users can retain their methodologies for developing software and also retain the favorite collaboration processes outside of development.

In addition to project-tracking, JIRA also includes a service desk element for IT and other service teams including non-technical business teams such as marketing, finance and human resources.

“Every team needs some way to organize tasks, activities, projects, deliverables and deadlines,” said Atlassian’s President Jay Simons in an article published by CIO magazine. “JIRA started as a way for tech teams to manage collaboration around products and the things that needed to get done. Over time it has been pulled in other directions by many parts of the business.”

Improved collaboration and communication due to Remain’s IBM i-focused integration work is expected to increase software engineering productivity through streamlined processes that speed the delivery of applications and lower costs.

TD/OMS tasks or requests can be added to the JIRA workflow from within the TD/OMS UI. TD/OMS users who are not heavily involved in JIRA, but require overview of TD/OMS-related JIRA issues, should benefit from the integration.

TD/OMS is an IBM i Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution supporting change, development, modernization, and multi-platform deployment processes. It provides control over the software life cycle process and provides a real time overview of software components and configuration. For companies with compliance and auditing requirements, it’s a tool for managing and monitoring app development component movements.

The Eclipse-based Remain Software ALM tool is also integrated with IBM’s Rational Developer for i (RDi), including the latest release RDi 9.5. The integration allows access of TD/OMS functions within the RDi interface. Those functions include task management, check-out, edit, source compare, compilation and problem resolution.

TD/OMS is also integrated with solutions, such as Fresche Legacy‘s X-Analysis code analysis tool, Linoma Software‘s RPG Toolbox for modernization projects, and BCD‘s WebSmart PHP, a Web application development environment.

The integration with WebSmart PHP is a recent development. It provides a graphical overview of all PHP component relations, which can be displayed within TD/OMS or other PHP editors, including Zend Studio.

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