Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Tips for Setting up a New Project in IBM's Jazz Team Server

I've just set up my first few projects on IBM's Jazz platform.  It's dead simple, but there are a few things I've learned which are worth knowing.  I've listed them so others can benefit from my experiences.  

NOTE: this is all done with the Web UI.  Once you've completed these steps, its best to move to the Eclipse-based client for the rest of your configuration as the errors are less cryptic / actually exist.
  1. Think about what you need before you do anything.  You need to know what you will name your project (we named ours after the client), which process you will use (we are going for Scrum), what your development lines are (we have the default mainline and also an existing release (we have inherited a codebase) and what teams ("Team Areas") you will need (we have one for our client who will access the web UI as well as multiple for ourselves).  There are other descicions to make, but these are the ones you will need at the beginning.
  2. Create an admin user for your project area.  Give them JazzAdmin priviledges and also (temporarily) a Developer licence.
  3. Logged in as your project admin user deploy the bundled process configurations
  4. Still logged in as your project admin user, create the users you need, allocating them licences as appropriate.  As well as the "real" users, you will likely need a Build user.
  5. Before you create your Project area, deploy the bundled process configurations
  6. Create your project, making sure you select the process you want to use.  Add the users you have created as applicable.  Allocate the users to process roles (i.e. Team Member, ScrumMaster etc.)
  7. Create any additional Development Lines.  We kept the default "Main Development Line" but also added a "Support Development Line"
  8. Create team areas as required.  We had several - one for the client, one for our onsite support, another for the existing app maintenance, and a fourth for new development.  Team Members can belong to more than one team so don't worry about allocation when designing this layout.  Make sure when you create a Team Area that you select the required Development Line
  9. Allocate team members to the team areas as appropriate.  I choose to send the invite emails as this makes getting new members onboard easier
  10. Remove the default admin user (archive the account)
  11. Set up backups 
Additional Notes:
  • I've tried this on Jazz 1.0 and 1.0.1
  • It might seem as if you can't rename or archive some things after you've created them if you're using the Web UI.  Swap to the Eclipse client and you will probably be in luck.
  • I've not covered adding additional "Setup Work Items" which are automatically generated for each user upon creation.  This should be done before team members are added.  I'll cover this in a later blog post

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