Customer Reviews

Implementing IBM® Rational® ClearQuest®: An End-to-End Deployment Guide

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Most IT professionals know the value of a good software defect tracking system. And if you're already using the Rational family of software offerings, one of your logical choices would be IBM Rational ClearQuest. If you're at the starting stages of selling the idea of ClearQuest and planning an implementation, then this is a really good read for you... Implementing IBM Rational ClearQuest: An End-to-End Deployment Guide by Christian D. Buckley, Darren W. Pulsipher, and Kendall Scott.

Contents: Building and Maintaining the Feedback Loop with Customers; The Value Proposition; Selling Your Team on Change Management; Moving Parts; Analyzing Your Company's Needs; Designing Your System; Implementation - Schema and Database Design; Implementation - Customizing the Schema and Creating Hooks; ClearQuest for Eclipse; ClearQuest Integrations; Deployment and Administration; Multisite Development; Epilogue; Index

Prior to reading this book, I really couldn't have explained to someone what ClearQuest was. And with a similarly named product called ClearCase, I would have gotten confused in all likelihood. This book does a very nice job of explaining the value of a defect tracking system in an organization, what it needs to offer the different parties, and the real costs of not having one in place. Because of the flexibility and depth of the package, it's not an "install, click here, and you're up and running" system. As such, the book spends quite a bit of time explaining the planning process involved in determining how the database and underlying schema should be designed for your particular needs. You don't have to start from scratch, but there are a multitude of options available. It helps to have an underlying background in UML, as that's the mechanism used in the book to explain classes, uses, etc. But don't let that scare you off. The writing is surprisingly readable for something like this...

If you're considering the use of ClearQuest for defect tracking, or if you don't have a tracking system in place, take two or three hours and go through this book. It will lay the proper groundwork for what you're about to do, and it will be time well spent as you travel down the implementation path.

For defect tracking and management, perhaps the best usage of ClearQuest is when it is integrated into Eclipse. IBM has made a nice environment, within which it is easy to perform defect handling. With the reasonable promise that this can scale to large development projects, with hundreds (or more) of defects.

The so-called statechart diagrams are the most interesting part of the book. A statechart is a state diagram for a given defect or family of defects. However, while the text shows an example diagram, ClearQuest itself has a user interface consisting of a matrix form. It does not show all the information in a state diagram, but ClearQuest claims that it is easier to use. I'm not so sure about this. Perhaps a future version might also let the state diagram be shown and used.

Implementing ClearQuest is by the authors of "The Art of ClearCase Deployment" and follows a similar line. It is not an outright technical book for embittered ClearQuest Administrators (although it does have some technical content), rather it is a guide on how to design and model a change request process and then subsequently implement it in ClearQuest. This technique works well because ClearQuest is a very open-ended product and you need to carefully plan what you are going to implement in it. I would encourage anyone new to ClearQuest to read this first part of the books carefully. The second part of the book, which describes how ClearQuest works and can be configured is less succesful - not adding signifcant value over the manual or IBM developerWorks in my opinion - however it is still well written and consistent.