Assets in Rational Asset Manager

Assets are a collection of artifacts, or files, that provide a reusable solution to a specific business problem. Assets also have metadata, or information about their purpose, use, and relation to other assets, so that you can reuse assets to solve business problems.

To view a 4-minute demonstration of how IBM® Rational® Asset Manager can become a central catalog for reusable assets in your organization, watch this On Demand Demo.

Assets can include artifacts that solve a problem

Assets can contain all of the artifacts, including other assets, that work together to solve a specific business problem. Artifacts are files that users can group together to form assets. Artifacts can be work products from software development processes, such as software requirements, designs, models, source code, data, tests, user interfaces, and documentation. You can also include artifacts that explain the goals, processes, and motivations for creating and using assets.

For more information about artifacts, see Asset artifacts.

Assets have descriptive metadata

Assets contain descriptive information, or metadata, that you can use to find and reuse assets. Asset metadata includes, but is not limited to the following information:

Mandatory information: Each asset requires basic descriptive information, such as its name, owner, version number, type, and community. For more information, see Asset attributes.
Descriptive attributes: You can create additional custom attributes to capture other types of information in the form of dates, text, numbers, links, or other formats. You can make custom attributes mandatory by using constraints on asset types, or by using policies. For more information, see Asset attributes.
Rich text description: For every asset, you can create an optional description of any length that includes formatted text, links, and rich media.
Categories: You can use categories to organize assets in hierarchies. For more information, see Category schemas.
Relationships: You can relate assets to other assets in the repository and specify the nature of their connection, such as Dependent/Dependency. For more information, see Asset relationships.
Tags: You can add tags for assets so that you can create your own descriptions and organizational schemes for assets.

Descriptive metadata helps people find assets when they search with keywords, use filters to narrow search results, browse categories of assets, or discover other assets through relationships and dependencies.

Assets can be any size

A large asset might include all of the elements of a business requirement, such as its use cases, design models, components, component specifications, test cases, test drivers, and test data. A small asset might contain information about a specific problem, such as test cases for an implementation.

Assets should be reused

By reusing assets, a company can avoid the costs of producing redundant assets in different branches. For example, one branch of a large company develops an implementation for a help window in a web-based application. A second branch of the company also needs a help window. Instead of developing their own implementation, developers within the second branch search for an asset that fits their requirements. They find the pre-existing asset implementation for a help window, download it, and modify it to suit their particular context.

Assets can undergo custom review processes to manage change over time

Review processes, or lifecycles, ensure that an asset is complete, accurate, and optimized for reuse over time. Users or user groups can review assets according to their specific area of expertise.

Assets in lifecycles always have a state, such as Draft or Approved. Repository administrators create master lifecycles, which can be extended by community administrators, to manage what happens in different states, the transitions between states, and which users can view and modify an asset in a particular state. For more information about review processes and lifecycles, see Asset review and governance.

Assets can be controlled through various methods

By governing assets, a company can control who can access, view, or modify an asset. A company can control how users modify assets and can require that users include specific metadata or artifacts with an asset. For example, a tester must download an asset for testing purposes. However, a developer also must download the asset and change it. With asset governance, the tester and developer can interact with the repository in different ways according to task requirements. The two major components of asset governance in Rational Asset Manager are communities and roles and permissions.