IBM announced four IBM Rational products that are among the first to apply the new Change Management services developed by the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative. As a founding member of the OSLC, IBM is working with an open community of software vendors, integrators and corporate software delivery teams to develop specifications that make it easier for development teams to use lifecycle tools in combination and more efficiently share information between systems.

"Software delivery teams rely on a range of tools from different industry sources to get their jobs done," Martin Nally, chief technology officer for IBM Rational Software, says. "We did not hesitate to embrace the OSLC Change Management services in our Rational software development solutions, because we recognize the tremendous potential of the industry coming together to agree on ways to integrate and share data between tools."

The first OSLC specification on Change Management was published this summer. It defines a common set of services and formats for interacting with change management systems. Tools that use the new Change Management specification can more easily maintain tool integrations from different vendors and better manage the information contained within their change management systems. For example, a quality management tool can better integrate with a change management system to log and track software defects.

IBM product interfaces are supported by the latest versions of IBM Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational ClearQuest software. A version for Rational (formerly Telelogic) Change is also due out in September. Additionally, IBM Rational Quality Manager and IBM Business Partner Tasktop Technologies use OSLC interfaces for integrations with Rational Team Concert, Rational ClearQuest and Rational Change.

For more information on the Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration, go here.

For more information on IBM Rational, visit here.