The Rational Best Practices, Tools and Services
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Chapter 1 - Welcome to Rational Suite
Figure 1
The Rational Best Practices, Tools, and Services
Rational helps you increase your productivity and effectiveness by focusing on these
software development best practices:
Develop software iteratively.
Iterative development means analyzing, designing, and
implementing incremental subsets of the system over the project lifecycle. The project
team plans, develops, and tests an identified subset of system functionality for each
iteration. The team develops the next increment, integrates it with the first iteration,
and so on. Each iteration results in either an internal or external release and moves
you closer to the goal of delivering a product that meets its requirements.
Developing iteratively helps you:
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Make your project more predictable.
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Collect feedback early.
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Identify and eliminate risks early in the project.
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Test continuously throughout the project lifecycle.
Manage requirements.
A requirement is one criterion for a project's success. Your
project requirements answer questions like "What do customers want?" and "What
new features must we absolutely ship in the next version?" Most software
development teams work with requirements. On smaller, less formal projects,
requirements might be kept in text files or e-mail messages. Other projects can use
more formal ways of recording and maintaining requirements.
