Concept: About Jazz Process Templates
This page introduces the concept of Jazz Process Template and Specification.
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Main Description

The Team Process Component uses an XML representation for defining process referred to as the Process Specification. The Process Specification specifies the project's lifecycle and how the process will impact tool behavior based on the iteration you are in and the process roles played by the tool's users. It also defines how a new project shall be initialized, e.g. team areas, streams, and work items.

Process specifications are maintained within a Project Area for each and every project. However, users can manage sets of reusable process specifications as so-called Process Templates on their team server. When creating a new project area one can use such a template as a starting point and adapt it to the project's needs.  Process templates can be maintained with a link to a process documentation. Such documentation can be provided by a method authoring tool such as Rational Method Composer. The Rational Method Composer documentation that you are reading just now is an example for such a documentation for a particular process template.

A Process Specification comprises of the following three major parts:

  1. Role Definitions: defines the process roles. Roles are used to define role-based permissions and rules.
  2. Project Configuration: defines the following specifications
    • Project Area Initialization: defines which operations shall be executed when creating a new project to prepare and pre-populate the project area. The operations listed here can are executed both on the client-side as well as server-side.
      • Client-side Initialization: typically includes operations which shall be executed on the Jazz client instance of the user creating the new project. For example, the OpenUP/Jazz process template specifies that the client should query and display the initial work items which were created by the server-side initialization.
      • Server-side Initialization: typically includes the creation and or initialization of a team area, project stream, workspace, initial work items, and initial reports.
    • Permissions: provides global access to roles to perform specific operations.
    • Configuration Data: defines static data structures that are used to configure Jazz components and tools. Examples for configuration data are definitions of specific work item types such as defect or task, attribute values for work item severities and work item priorities, specification of work item forms and the placement of attributes in these forms as well as the workflow for work item instances defining states and actions to get from one state to the next. These structures remain constant throughout the whole project.
  3. Team Configuration: comprises comprises of sections for team-specific permissions and process rules such as Operation Preconditions. It further defines the project iteration lifecycle and which defaults of the previous sections can be overridden for a specific iteration. This section can also define so-called Iteration Types that pre-define configurations for specific types of iterations such as 'regular development' or 'stabilization' that can be easily reused with all their settings when creating an iteration for a project.
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