IBM Rational testing tool advance

Computer Business Review ran this interesting story on the recovery of IBM Rational:

"Having lagged behind all the other IBM software brands with nominal or negative growth, by Q3 last year, the Rational brand tied Lotus with 12% growth, exceeded only by WebSphere. After years in the slow lane, the natural question is whether Q3 was a fluke or a sign of rebirth.

Over the past couple of years, Rational has modernized its client-side developer tools under the Eclipse framework. It came after some false starts, such as XDE, which was supposed to be the successor to the Rational Rose modeling tool, and Rational Rapid Developer.

Last year saw the release of testing tools that linked to Tivoli for closing the loop on performance testing with actual production data, the first upgrades to Rational Portfolio Manager (RPM), and the long-awaited open source updating of Rational's process tools, which will also cover alternatives to Rational's Unified Process (RUP).

And last year saw the changing of the guard. Danny Sabbah, whose background included chief technology architect for WebSphere, succeeded Rational co-founder Mike Devlin. To many observers, the transition couldn't have happened soon enough because, until recently, many felt that Rational's best days were behind it.Way back when, Rational invented the concept of a unified software development lifecycle. It spanned use case modeling and requirements management to architecture, design, development, and testing. "

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