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Introduction


Overview

To successfully develop software in today's market, the project team members need to:

These challenges are rooted in complexity and change. A software system's complexity increases with the magnitude of its requirements —— software that must do a lot (and do it quickly and reliably) tends to have a large number of constituent modules that combine and interact in numerous ways. As a project's complexity increases:

Left unchecked, these difficulties quickly translate into longer schedules and higher costs, and ultimately jeopardize the success of the project.

Making changes to complex software can also give rise to a host of problems that pose serious risks to achieving high quality within the constraints of schedule and budget. On a large enough project, these problems become the dominant factors determining success or failure. Some of the most common problems are:

Apex helps meet these challenges by reducing complexity and minimizing the impact of change through:

Apex/Summit includes Rational Summit/TM, Rational's task management system. It provides a framework for automated process control that simplifies and improves management insight as well as engineering productivity and coordination. It helps control the software process by keeping track of the work (or tasks) necessary to complete a project. Additional information can be found in Task Management (Apex/Summit).

The goal of this manual is to present the concepts and processes that can be used to manage a software development effort.

This manual consists of two main parts. The chapters in the first part describe how Apex components are used to support the entire development and release life cycle of a software system:

The chapters in the second part discuss one method for developing software. The steps in the Software Development Process illustrated in Figure 1. This process may be used with Apex/Summit. For information on the process when using Apex ClearCase, please see Developing Software withClearCase and Managing Software with ClearCase. ClearCase 4.0 and higher provides a complete process via UCM.

Figure 1 The Software Development Process

The steps to set up, develop, and release a system using Apex are described on a high level. Details of all the commands can be found in the Online Reference and the Command Reference.


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