IBM Lab
IBM® Rational Software Architect: An Architectural Approach to Solving Complexity
What you need to design and construct today’s sophisticated application architectures.
Rational Software Architect (RSA) provides an architectural approach to solving complexity, ensuring you can Deliver Robust, Scalable SOA with confidence and Get Your Architecture Right!
Key Pillars
1. Tame Complexity
Achieve better results by focusing on architecture and requirements from the start.
- Requirements-Driven Business-Aligned Outcomes: Align development with business goals by iteratively transforming and tracing requirements to architectures. Use traceability to prove that final features meet project specifications. Analyze the impact of changing requirements throughout design and implementation to manage risk.
- Architectural Analysis and Engineering of IT Systems: See the big picture and iterate to the details.
- IT Systems Analysis and Engineering: Visualize the structure and underlying architecture of existing applications through reverse engineering and inspection. Incorporate functional and operational views to understand the current state, desired state, and the path between them.
- Automation, Reuse, and Quicker Time to Market: Create custom software factories, and save time and money through industry extensions and patterns-based engineering.
- Integrated Development Environment: Leverage a fully integrated software development environment by combining the power of Eclipse and Rational Application Developer Standard Edition. Create applications in Java EE, Java SE, C#, and C++.
- Agile Sketching: Quickly capture and express thoughts at “think speed” and selectively formalize them as semantic model elements. Extend this “actionable whiteboard” across space and time.
2. Get Your Architecture Right!
Validate your designs before implementation to ensure high-quality applications.
- Test and Validate Your Designs:
- Simulate your application’s intended functionality and behavior.
- Find and fix problems early, before implementation.
- Animate the dynamic behavior of your architectures to expose run-time information.
- Use the RSA Simulation Toolkit for detailed control to debug your architecture (breakpoints, stepping, suspend, resume, inject events).
- Analyze how messages will flow across the planned deployment infrastructure to identify potential conflicts.
3. Integrate Collaboration & Design into the Application Lifecycle
RSA introduces a new era in development team productivity with collaborative design management.
- Collaborative Design Management for RSA (RSA Design Manager/Review):
- Maximize Productivity: Utilize a central location to store and access designs, enabling quick searching for review, analysis, and reuse.
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate among stakeholders on software architectures and deployment plans, allowing stakeholders to easily access and review designs via the Web client, leading to faster consensus and improved quality.
- Faster Design Reviews: Shorten time-to-market and improve quality by automating the design review process. Stakeholders can view the design and attach comments and mark-up via the Web or rich client.
- Multi-discipline Document Generation and Reporting: Satisfy regulatory demands with multi-discipline document generation and reporting (in conjunction with Rational Publishing Engine) for specifications, compliance, and auditing.
- Built on JAZZ TEAM SERVER: Open and extensible on the Jazz platform for in-context collaboration, right-sized governance, and day-one productivity.
Flexible Packaging & Extensions
The Rational Software Architect Family offers flexible packaging to pick the combination you need.
Rational Software Architect Core Foundation
- UML 2.2 modeling support
- Sketching
- Requirements integration with end-to-end traceability
- Built-in transformations for Java, C#, and VB.NET
- Cloud support
Extensions Available (Select what you need)
- Extension for SOA and WebSphere: Build scalable SOA implementations for WAS (SCA), Portal, or WPS (BPEL). Leverage IBM for SOA planning and analysis, including importing BPMN2 Process Models to create SoaML Service Models.
- Extension for Integrated Architecture Frameworks: Fully represent business concerns in the design and interconnect them to requirements. Address the U.S. Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF 2).
- Extension for Deployment Planning + Deployment Automation Planning + Content Pack for RAFW and WAS: Solve complex deployment problems by planning, automating, and governing application deployment leveraging IBM Rational, IBM WebSphere, and IBM Tivoli capabilities. Applied to Cloud Technology: Virtualize, standardize, and automate.
- Extension for Communication Applications: Add real-time communications functionality to your IT application, including designing call flows, generating servlets/tests for SIP (VoIP/IPTV), and incorporating telecom web services (Parlay X, TM Forum NGOSS).
- Extension for C++
- Simulation Toolkit (Included in core foundation, often offered as an add-on)
