Technical tracks

The Call for Papers for the IBM Rational Software Conference 2010 is now open! This year’s line-up of technical tracks is listed below as well as the suggested listing of speaker topics for each track. If you would like to submit an application to participate as a speaker at this year’s conference, submit your abstract today.

• Submit your speaker application

  (Deadline is December 31, 2009.)

Recent reports indicate a significant rise in Web application attacks for the purpose of stealing or manipulating data. The cost of recovering from these types of breaches is significant. Current reactive, manual approaches are cost prohibitive, fall short of effectively protecting the organization & cannot facilitate ongoing compliance requirements. This track focuses on the fundamentals of application security - common attack types, analysis techniques, when to outsource security, securing the production environment, fine-grained application entitlements and best practices and approaches for integrating security testing across the development lifecycle. Emerging threats in Web 2.0 environments such as social network sites, SOA security and the inherent risks of Web-enabling legacy applications are also explored. This track is for security auditors, managers, penetration testers, and others interested in application security and compliance.

Suggested Topics for Application Security and Compliance track:

• Enterprise application security
• Analysis techniques
• Emerging trends & threats
• Secure development principals
• Tips & tricks
• Best practices for application security
• Achieving and maintaining regulatory compliance

Change and configuration management, a key capability in modern software development, is at the core of application lifecycle management. Learn how to improve productivity and team collaboration, implement Agile practices, gain better visibility into projects, automate workflows, improve quality, manage distributed teams, and provide audit trails and traceability across the software and systems development lifecycle for fast delivery of high-quality software. This track is for practitioners, managers, administrators, and advanced users who want to learn how IBM Rational change and configuration management solutions can empower organizations to improve software and systems delivery and lifecycle traceability from requirements through deployment.  

Suggested Topics for Change and Configuration Management track:

• Reducing software development cost of ownership
• Software and systems CCM best practices
• Agile development with Rational Team Concert (Scrum, taskboards, daily stand-ups, retrospectives, sprints, backlogs)
• Change management best practices for Rational DOORs requirements
• Expanding the use of Rational change management solutions across the enterprise (for example, integrations with Integrated Product Lifecycle Management tools or ITIL and CMM compliance)
• Benefits of integrating social media with Rational change management solutions (Microsoft Sharepoint or Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, Wikis, RSS feeds, Instant Messaging)
• Developing Microsoft VS.Net applications with Rational CCM solutions
• Using Rational CCM solutions to collaborate with customers and 3rd party suppliers
• Connecting Rational CCM tools with other Rational, commercial or open source tools Rational CCM product tips and tricks (Tailoring process and templates, creative use of dashboards, reporting techniques)
• Benefits of using the Rational ClearCase Remote Client for Distributed Development
• Benefits and best practices of using Rational Change and Rational Synergy for embedded component-based development
• Leveraging Rational ClearCase and/or Rational ClearQuest with Rational Team Concert
• Deploying Rational Team Concert in a cloud environment
• Using Rational Team Concert as a lean ALM solution
• Surrounding and unifying multiple software configuration management tools with Rational Team Concert (ClearCase, Synergy, Git, Subversion, etc.)
• Incrementally adopting Rational Team Concert capabilities or Rational Team Concert deployment best practices

Collaborative application lifecycle management coordinates people, processes, and tools in an iterative cycle of inter-related activities, including definition, design, development, testing, deployment, and management. The ALM track features the latest IBM Rational solutions and best practices that will ensure effective collaboration, automation, and reporting across the software delivery lifecycle. Specifically, this track will go in-depth into Jazz-based technology and solutions available. Whether you are a head’s down developer, a high-level CIO, or anyone in between, this track provides the necessary insight to provide a transparent and collaborative environment for application lifecycle management.

• Mashups and widgets in Jazz
• Jazz foundation roadmap
• Deeper technical dive into Jazz
• Document generation and performance management and requirements management
• Creating documents across the Rational delivery lifecycle
• Rational Publishing Engine advantages over SoDA and DocExpress
• Performance Management across the Application Lifecycle
• Measuring the effectiveness of ALM projects
• Framework driven performance management (CMMI, MCIF, Six Sigma)
• C/ALM and Jazz – Introduction and Overview
• C/ALM workshop – RQM, RTC, RRC working in harmony
• Agile development in a Jazz world
• Agility at scale – how big can agile grow?
• Building bridges – ensuring requirements are linked throughout the ALM process
• Best practices for a transparent, distributed team
• Case study – RRC, RTC, RQM working at scale
• UCM and Jazz or UCM vs. Jazz? – high level
• UCM workshop – roundtrip view of ALM
• Jazz in a UCM world

IBM’s Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) solution helps organizations make architecture actionable by providing linkages and smooth handoff between enterprise architecture, application/project portfolio management, and solution architecture, driving alignment of IT investments to business. This track focuses on assisting management teams make faster, better-informed strategic and tactical decisions using enterprise blueprints, and then crystallize those decisions and priorities into actionable plans. It explores how to increase operational efficiency and achieve cost savings from consolidation, merger & acquisition, and other change initiatives. Attendees will see how organizations can connect the dots from strategy to execution and get clear visibility into the results achieved. This track is for LOB Executives, IT Executives, Business Strategists, Enterprise Architects, Business Analysts, IT Architects, Solution Architects, Software Architects, Data Architects and Project managers, interested in EA best practices and real-world experiences.

Suggested Topics for Enterprise Architecture Management track:

• Using Enterprise Architecture to improve Business Efficiency
• Experiences in business transformation using Enterprise Architecture
• Enterprise Decision Support empowered by enterprise blueprints that drive business and IT collaboration
• Overcoming audit and regulatory challenges
• Effective IT planning to drive successful IT Consolidation, Mergers and Acquisitions, and other change initiative.
• Best practices in using Enterprise Architecture in complex, large scale “System of Systems” scenarios
• SAP and Packaged Application Governance
• Experiences in using EA to drive Service Architecture and Business Process Management (BPM) projects
• Using Architecture Frameworks such as DODAF, MODAF, NAF, Zachman, TOGAF, FEAF, EA3, etc

Today's business organizations don't develop for just one server, platform, or environment for as the saying goes develop once and deploy in many places. This track provides solutions for the multitude of environments in which businesses operate today including mainframe, power and distributed development environments. It will showcase IBM Rational's Enterprise Modernization solutions that enable organizations to: reduce project risk by managing and extracting value from their application portfolio, exploit new technologies to deliver more flexible business solutions, empower new and existing IT staff to build multiple platform applications, increase productivity with a modern software delivery platform, and improve development efficiency and collaboration by unifying multiple teams. This track is for IT and Development leaders, analysts, architects, strategists, developers, and programmers concerned with application development in a multiple platform environment.

Suggested Topics for Enterprise Modernization track:

• Lowering the cost of multi-platform application development and Delivery
• How my development organization keeps cost on HW and SW Development low by using z/OS emulation on the desktop.
• Our company's application development portfolio strategy - how we found out what we have and how to quickly use and improve it.
• How our company became more productive with modern development tools for IBM p/i hardware platforms
• How our team used IBM EM solutions for a cross geography development project.
• How Jazz and Team Concert are used for IBM System z
• How Jazz and Team Concert are used for IBM Power
• How Team Concert was used in a multiple platform environment
• How RTCz and RDz were used in conjunction to develop an application
• Why RDz is great for application development on the mainframe
• Why Rational Team Concert for System z or IBM Power is important to our development success.
• Why we upgraded to the newest compiler release and the additional performance results obtained
• Web 2.0 rich user interfaces using Rational solutions for IBM System z
• Web 2.0 rich user interfaces using Rational solutions for IBM Power
• A customer success story using EGL
• How our organization took at 3270 or 5250 application and moved it to a hand-held using Host Access Transformation Services
• How Rational tools solve multiple platform development environment problems.
• Lowering TCO using EM Tools - - a customer story
• Debunking the myths about IBM p and z platforms
• Enterprise development meets Web 2.0 - a customer example
• Reduce cost and improve flexibility by leveraging modern architectures
• Convert your Legacy - How we did it quickly and efficiently
• Building SOA applications for the IBM i and Power platforms
• Building SOA applications for the IBM System z platform
• Building banking, insurance or financial applications for the IBM Sysem z platform
• Building banking, insurance or financial applications for the IBM i and Power platform

If IT is to become a business enabler, it must create unique competitive advantage through faster, more cost effective delivery of IT services. This will require an integrated approach to designing, delivering and managing services across the service lifecycle. This track will detail how Integrated Service Management from IBM enables more effective utilization of information, assets, and technology across the service lifecycle -- integrating and aligning tools, processes, and functions across enterprise architecture, development, testing, and IT operations teams. This track is for IT executives and managers tasked with controlling cost, while delivering new applications and services to the business, it is no longer sufficient to think of IT as a collection of specialized silos.

Suggested topics for Integrated Service Management track:

• Integration between IBM Rational Asset Manager and IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database
• Integration between IBM Rational Performance Tester and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Monitor
• Manage development infrastructure availability and performance management.
• Integration between trouble ticketing and fix tracking.
• Automate the testing lifecycle process.
• Manage converging business and IT assets with integrated asset lifecycle management, service desk, service request and change management.
• Instrumenting smart assets, digitized physical assets, and IT assets with integrated IT event management and business event processing.
• Improving visibility into service and infrastructure health and activity across the dynamic infrastructure with business service management dashboards and business activity monitoring.
• Designing a dynamic infrastructure with IBM enterprise architecture software & services.
• Interconnecting smart assets and IT assets with SOA.
• Strategy and change services to help transform existing services into smarter business services.
• Managing Cloud deployments.

Innovative software and systems drive today's modern business, and best in class companies need to effectively meet customer requirements to differentiate themselves from the competition. This track details numerous methods and practices, including a model-driven approach, to successfully design reliable, reusable, flexible and maintainable architectures and software for IT and embedded systems. Learn the latest capabilities, trends, and techniques in software, architecture and systems engineering to improve the product and software delivery process. The track also covers innovative software development processes and technologies showing how both visual and code-centric development can help organizations streamline the delivery of cutting-edge solutions. This track is for software architects, systems engineers, and software developers interested in best practices and the latest innovations in methodology and tools for supporting architectural design, discovery, control, construction and assembly.

Suggested Topics for Modeling, Architecture and Construction track:

• Systems and software architecture and design best practices
• Integrated design including business, requirements, and software modeling
• Customer case studies featuring benefits of software delivery with Rational Software Architect, Rational Rhapsody, or Rational Application Developer
• Model-driven-development, Model-driven-requirements engineering - leveraging transformations and automation
• Quality-driven software development - model-driven testing, integration of code and application test within the development lifecycle
• Agile and collaborative modeling and development/Jazz-based Model-driven-development
• Safety and mission critical development with models
• Software architecture and development on and for the cloud
• Reusability and software product line engineering with Rational Rhapsody
• Systems engineering with SysML or UML using Rational Rhapsody
• Developing JEE6 applications with Rational solutions
• Domain specific modeling such as DoDAF MODAF, UPDM, AUTOSAR
• Operational and deployment architecture specification using Rational Software Architect
• Designing for small or embedded targets with Rational Rhapsody
• Large scale system architecture and development
• Patterns-based engineering and using Rational Software Architect's pattern analysis engine
• Enhanced SOA modeling and design using Rational Software Architect
• How to build SOA applications (use of SCA, services test tools, Restful SOA)
• Developing Web 2.0 applications with Rational solutions (REST, AJAX, WebSphere Web 2.0 feature pack integration)
• From system-of-systems engineering (DoDAF) to SysML-based systems engineering
• Multicore development using a model based paradigm with WindRiver

Process, Project and Portfolio Management helps ensure that organizations can adapt to changing market conditions by ensuring that Software and Systems Delivery is fully integrated with business planning and operations, and drives consistent and measurable alignment with business priorities as teams execute across an integrated application lifecycle. Attendees will gain in-depth knowledge of how Rational PPM is helping executives achieve visibility and real-time decision support, helping IT leaders deliver significant business value and ensure constant alignment of project investments with evolving business objectives, and helping project leaders to identify, implement and drive adoption of repeatable best-practice approaches for successful execution. This track is for executives, IT leaders, project, program, and portfolio managers, process engineers, and other stakeholders concerned with optimizing IT investments with industry best practices and team unifying tools for more collaboration, predictability, adaptability, and visibility.

Suggested Topics for Process, Product and Portfolio Management track:

• Strategic Portfolio Management
• Framework driven performance management (CMMI, MCIF, Six Sigma)
• Application Portfolio Management (Integrating Enterprise Architecture with Portfolio Management)
• PPM and Change Management: Integrated management models that drive service management and transformational agendas in concert
• Product Lifecycle Management: When the IT platform is the product.
• Managing and optimizing project execution with real-time, “in-context” collaboration
• Integrating PPM across the software delivery lifecycle
• Establishing and enacting the right decision and policies
• Using IBM Rational Method Composer to Author, Customize, Deploy, and Manage Industry- standard Frameworks (eg. IBM Practices, Rational Unified Process, IT Information Library, PMBOK, Six Sigma, CMMI and CobiT)
• Enabling Developers to Adopt Best Practices-, Enactment, Code Review, Measurement and feedback
• Project governance in the context of an integrated development eco system
• Incremental, Results-driven Process Improvement
• Agile software development with IBM Practices / RUP/OpenUP
• Agility at scale
• Process Implementation Case Studies in IT Projects
• The Next Generation PPM Solutions for an Agile World
• PPM Technology and Techniques for practitioners
• The Project Manager: Using PPM tools and techniques to capture business value
• Integrating MS-Project with your IBM Rational solutions
• Integrating PPM with change and release management
• Project portfolio management with Rational Focal Point
• Managing resources and demands
• PPM tools as an open platform
• PPM for software and system development – How is it different?
• Automating project document generation
• Measuring your capability improvement: MCIF, CMMI, ITIL
• Practical experiences with Measured Capability Improvement Framework
• Measuring initiatives and programs: monitoring, metrics, and models
• Managing demand and optimizing resource allocations in IT
• Planning and estimation techniques for IT organizations
• Managing value and risk in project and product portfolios
• Measuring success and performance with the IBM Rational products implementations in the short, medium and long term
• Understanding the tie between business and operational objectives; determining what incremental actions to reach those objectives
• Enabling effective business-focused strategic continuous improvement: pain points, driving alignment, and measuring outcomes
• Customer experiences with performance management for SSD

Quality driven software delivery enables teams to cut risk and cost and speed time to market by making confident project decisions based on real time quality management metrics. This track is dedicated to the IBM Rational tools and industry best practices that can help software delivery teams focus on quality driven software delivery. Attendees gain in-depth guidance from experienced IBM experts and customers on a wide range of quality management topics. Learn innovative tool techniques, how to work with existing resources and how to overcome schedule constraints in order to increase productivity and value to the organization while enhancing project success. This track is for testers and others on the project team — analysts, architects, developers, and deployment managers — looking for valuable, actionable information that can be used to build and delivery quality applications and services.

Suggested Topics for Quality Management track:

• Innovative test management strategies with IBM Rational Quality Manager
• Innovative uses of IBM® Rational® Functional Tester
• Innovative uses of IBM® Rational® Performance Tester
• Innovative uses of IBM® Rational® Service Tester for SOA Quality
• Best practices and strategies for test lab management
• Best practices and strategies test management metrics and measurement
• Best practices and strategies for supporting a manual testing effort
• Best practices and strategies for test data management and data driven testing
• Case Studies on the effective use of IBM Rational Quality Tools
• Case Studies Detailing a Return on Investment by Using Rational Quality Tools and Processes
• Case Studies on quality practices outside the Quality Assurance department
• Managing the testing team: Structuring your organization for success
• Strategies for collaboration between Quality Assurance and software delivery teams
• Integrating post deployment application monitoring with the Quality Assurance team
• Managing the complexity of geographically distributed test teams
• Test-driven development
• Risk based testing
• Quality Management in an Agile world
• Quality Management in a Cloud computing environment
• Testing challenges in the Web 2.0 world
• Ensuring quality of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications
• Ensuring quality of Enterprise Resource Planning Applications (ERP) such as Siebel and SAP

Real World Implementation showcases customer case studies showing how IBM products and solutions have been used to solve real world IT and product delivery problems. Attendees will hear about benchmarked, in the trenches implementations and the real world value they delivered to the business.

Suggested Topics for Real World Implementation track:

• Heterogenous solution - IBM and non-IBM products integrated in the real world
• IBM customer success story
• IBM customer implementation story
• IBM competitive win story

Requirements Definition and Management encompasses all of the activities in both systems and IT that revolve around eliciting, defining, elaborating, understanding, organizing, reviewing, and communicating business, user, and software requirements. This also includes defining solutions based on those business goals and requirements. These activities are done because they help ensure that the applications and products that are developed solve the real business and customer problems. This track explores the experiences of organizations with tools, techniques, and processes used to effectively define and manage requirements and analyze systems. This track is for analysts, architects, developers, project managers, and others interested in methodology and tools for defining, managing, and analyzing requirements.

Suggested Topics for Requirements Definition and Management track:

• Requirements case studies
• Elicitation techniques for requirements and use cases
• Requirements project success stories and case studies
• Agile software development and requirements modeling
• Requirements management for large systems and teams
• Innovations in requirements definition and management
• Improving requirements processes
• Requirements management for outsourced projects
• Defining and managing requirements across geographically distributed teams
• Managing business rules
• Metrics and analysis used in requirements management
• Integrating requirements with project and portfolio management
• Eliciting and managing requirements for Service-Oriented Architecture applications
• Implications of regulatory compliance on the requirements management process
• Experiences with traceability
• Business specification-centric approaches
• Best practices in requirements definition
• Best practices in aligning business goals and IT
• Value based requirements engineering
• Requirements definition and management across the software life-cycle
• Requirements engineering in mixed software-hardware-solution projects and in systems engineering
• Requirements planning from the business analyst perspective
• Communication issues in requirements definition and management
• Requirement elicitation techniques
• Agile requirements definition and management
• Business modeling in requirements definition
• Collaborative requirements definition and management
• Requirements prioritization best practices and choosing your methodology
• Incorporating industry standards as reusable requirements
• Customer-focused product development

In order to optimize software delivery, organizations need to focus on automating, managing, standardizing, and tracking processes, as well as on managing best practices of code quality throughout the delivery lifecycle. Attendees will discover how automation is the key to improving application deployment, productivity, repeatability, and reliability. This track is for IT managers, practitioners, administrators, and advanced users who want to learn how IBM Rational software delivery automation solutions can help automate their processes and improve the efficiency & cost structure of their organization.

Suggested Topics for Software Delivery Automation track:

• Automation best practices for managing WebSphere administrative changes
• Using Build Forge for automating and optimizing software development in these challenging economic times
• Exploiting IT Cloud virtualization to reduce development costs
• Using IBM Rational Build Forge® to automate the enterprise build management processes and enable developer self-service
• Utilizing process automation within an Agile environment
• Case Study: Company name using Rational Build Forge for process automation
• Case Study: Company name using Rational Application Framework for managing WebSphere administration
• What’s New with the next generation of IBM Build Forge? (next gen)
• Introduction to IBM Rational Build Forge
• Utilizing process automation within a Cloud environment
• Maximizing your ROI with process automation
• Build Forge tips and tricks
• Rational software process automation - real value delivered, real customer stories
• Automate your processes and free your teams to create: A factory approach to software delivery
• Managing your code quality as part of the SDLC
• Implementing and automating code quality best practices – Rational Software Analyzer and Rational Build ForgeRSAR/BF or Rational Software Analyzer and Rational Team Concert
• Maximizing your ROI with with IBM Ratiional Software Analyzer
• Single session scanning for all your static code quality tools
• What's New in Rational Software Analyzer?
• Introduction to Rational Software Analyzer
• Rational Software Analyzer tips and tricks