Introduction to Rational Common Reporting

Rational® Common Reporting helps you get consistent metrics from across the organization, as well as toolsets to objectively measure status and progress. It implements standard measurements, reports, and dashboards to provide accurate insight into systems and software delivery. It helps follow a systematic approach to incrementally improve business, identify high priority business objectives and software delivery practices to address those objectives, and measure practice adoption and business results.

Rational Common Reporting automatically and objectively measures and reports program, project, and team level progress and status against pre-defined business objectives. Measurement guidance is taken from deployed practices, regulatory requirements, and best practices. The Rational Common Reporting server provides an extensive library of report and dashboard elements for scheduling and forecasting.

Rational Common Reporting enables an organization to:

  • Gain insight into software project performance and health through objective and consistent reporting
  • Manage and mitigate software development risks, reduce time-to-market, and improve product quality
  • Control software project costs and improve global development efficiencies
  • Enforce governance and achieve compliance in a changing global environment

Architecture

Rational Common Reporting leverages web architecture to extract data from distributed systems and generate both live and historical cross-product reports. It supports data retrieval from sources using either the REST architecture or direct database access. This data can be represented through customized dashboards and reports.

Rational Common Reporting contains the following main components:

The RIDW component is a database that stores an organization's information in normalized operational data stores and dimensional data marts. The RIDW can be hosted on IBM DB2®, Oracle or SQL Server. RIDW has an open schema. Any business intelligence tool can access RIDW to generate business reports.

The Rational Common Reporting Report Server is an instance of the Cognos BI Server. The Cognos BI Server is an integrated business intelligence suite that provides a wide range of functions to help you understand your organization's data. The components of the Cognos BI Server are: Report Studio, Query Studio, Cognos Connection, and Cognos Administration.

Note: Rational Quality Manager is also accessed through REST. The REST service provided by Rational Quality Manager is native to the product.
In a typical software development life cycle, data management is required in the following areas:
  • Requirements
  • Architecture
  • Process and portfolio
  • Quality
  • Change and release
A different tool can be used for each area to store, manage, and analyze data. The data analysis tools can be deployed on distributed systems, and accessed and used by geographically distributed teams with differing levels of responsibility. Rational Common Reporting uses the open web architecture to extract data from these disparate sources. Each data source is identified as a resource through a unique URL. The REST GET method is used to extract the data and represent it in formats such as XML or Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). The open web architecture makes it possible for Rational Common Reporting to extract data from any data source and not just from IBM Rational products.
Rational Common Reporting supports two kinds of reports.
  • Live reports: Live reports use data from operational source systems and data stores.
  • Historical reports: These reports use historical data pulled from the data marts to identify trends and aggregate information.
You can use the ETL capabilities of Rational Common Reporting to extract data through the REST GET interface or direct database access, transform the data through the encoded business rules, and load the transformed data into a conformed data mart. During this process, operational data is retrieved from a product source as an XML resource, mapped to relational data tables, and normalized in the data warehouse.

Rational Common Reporting server provides a comprehensive array of business intelligence functions in one product, on a single, proven architecture, including seamless reporting and dashboard capabilities.


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