Design management overview

Architectures, models, and designs help teams address the growing complexity of today's software and systems. Getting the design right is critical to communicating across teams and reducing costly rework later. However, design teams too often work in silos, which can lead to costly errors uncovered late in the lifecycle. Design Management is a collaborative web-based tool that enables a broad set of stakeholders to contribute to and influence the design of products, software, and systems. By using the design management capabilities in Rational® Software Architect and Rational Rhapsody® Design Manager, you can integrate design into the overall application and systems engineering lifecycles and collaborate on models and designs.

Design Management supports a collaborative approach to software and systems architecture and design. By integrating design management into the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM), you can associate all types of software and systems designs with other lifecycle resources such as requirements, change requests, and test artifacts. Software architects, system engineers, developers, and deployment planners can collaborate with peers, subject matter experts, clients, and other stakeholders over the Internet.

The design management capabilities in Rational Software Architect and Rational Rhapsody Design Manager supports integrations with the Jazz™ applications for change and configuration management, requirements management, and quality management.

For details on the Design Management project, refer to the project page on Jazz.net.

In-context collaboration

You can share models created in Rational Software Architect or Rational Rhapsody, edit the models by using the web client, and conduct online design reviews with peers and stakeholders.

You can also reuse existing resources and artifacts. For example, you can search the repository to find an element, place it on your own diagrams, and draw relationships to it, or to find an interface or component built by other teams that you want to reuse.

Lifecycle integrations

If you use Rational Software Architect, you can integrate design into the overall application development lifecycle. If you use Rational Rhapsody, you can integrate design into the overall systems and embedded software engineering lifecycle.

By incorporating design into the IT and Systems and Software Engineering workflows, you can collaborate on designs across organizational boundaries, disciplines, and domains. You can also manage complexity, mitigate risk, and improve the overall quality, time, and agility of your systems and software planning, design, and delivery.

Traceability and impact analysis

By integrating design management capabilities with CLM, you can set up links between design elements, other designs, and lifecycle artifacts (architecture management, requirements management, change management, and quality management.) The bidirectional traceability between requirements and designs enables you to easily see and understand the impact of changes to the requirements or designs. You can also create and view impact analysis diagrams to examine the links to and from specific target elements in a design.

Agile sketching

In Design Management, you can use the collaborative, agile sketching functionality to create sketches of architecture and design ideas. You can then share the sketches with colleagues and stakeholders, conduct reviews of the ideas, and revise the sketches before proceeding with formal modeling of the design.

Reporting and document generation

You can use the embedded document generation features and document templates to generate and share design documents, specifications, and reports. By using the Design Management web client to generate reports, project members and stakeholders can easily access information in the models and projects.

Change management for designs

You can store and manage different types of architectures, designs, and models.

Traditional design tools store designs in files that are managed by source control management (SCM) systems. In Design Management, designs and models are treated as first-class artifacts, which means that you can import models to the server and manage them directly at the model level; no mapping of model elements to files is required. This approach simplifies the workflow for successfully managing architectures and designs in a team context.

Common user administration and lifecycle project administration

You can install and configure Design Management to share a Jazz Team Server with CLM applications so that only a single user database is required and design projects are part of a lifecycle project.

By installing Design Management into a CLM environment with a shared Jazz Team Server, you benefit from the following common, or shared, lifecycle management functionality:
  • Common user administration
  • Lifecycle projects include designs
  • Money that Matter sample application includes design artifacts
  • Common deployment configurations
  • Common platform support

Domain modeling

If your organization uses the same domain or set of domains in multiple projects, you can configure projects in your organization’s development environment to use those domains. You can then share and collaborate on domain-specific models and designs across projects.

Client integrations

You can integrate Rational Software Architect or Rational Rhapsody with the Design Management Server. With this integration, you can access models and designs on the Design Management Server, search and query designs, analyze and review designs, and generate reports.


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