All of the topics in this Introduction section of this documentation are designed to help you gain a basic understanding of terms, concepts, and methodology. Rational Synergy products have several interfaces, but Rational Synergy is the main interface discussed in these topics.
It is assumed that you understand the fundamentals of your Windows or UNIX operating system and its associated directory file structure.
For users who work as developers or build managers.
CLI examples apply to both Windows and UNIX platforms.
The Rational® Synergy task-based methodology provides a straightforward way to develop and test software, even in complex environments. A task is a logical description of a change that might span many files. Rational Synergy makes it easy to define a configuration by choosing a baseline plus a list of tasks. You can automatically detect conflicts and see missing changes or extra changes, ensuring that you are building and delivering exactly what you expect. Through a tight integration with Rational Change, Rational Synergy provides full traceability, in both directions, between customer change requests and the baselines that include the fixes to those requests.
Rational Synergy helps teams solve advanced configuration management needs, such as complex parallel development and software reuse, also known as component-based development. Any Rational Synergy baseline can be marked as a component and easily reused by other teams.
Many aspects of the software development lifecycle are integrated, including process definition, source control, defect tracking, build management, and reporting. Each of these aspects is integrated in a single environment. You can track and manage the relationships between objects, promote sound development processes, and gather project information automatically and unobtrusively.
Rational Synergy projects follow a process. By customizing the process, you customize how your team works. A process specifies the process rules that you can use for a release. The release contains the built-in processes, process rules, and purposes. Rational Synergy provides support for your team to follow your process.
This supported development process suggests best practices for software development. For example, best practices include using insulated areas for developers to test and debug their work, performing frequent integration of the latest changes, and stabilizing milestone builds without introducing new changes.
You can use one of the delivered processes, or configure the process to meet your team and project requirements. Each team can use a different process.
Rational Synergy integrates with several other products, including Rational Change, Eclipse, and Microsoft Visual Studio. The following integrations are delivered with Rational Synergy:
These integrations must be separately installed on the client by each individual user.