Software development organizations need solutions that are flexible, easy to use, and integrate quickly, while still providing standardization and automation of repetitive processes. IBM Rational Build Forge was designed to leverage your existing development processes and tools while providing a framework to help you manage builds efficiently.

Using IBM Rational Build Forge, you can bring together existing individual processes to standardize build management environments quickly. The automation framework lets you use multiple scripting languages and methodologies (ant, make, batch files, perl, etc.) so you don't have to impact the way your developers work today.

IBM Rational Build Forge supports all of the common development languages, compilers, build tools, and platforms that you use today so you can automate all of your product builds. This means you can use a single environment to run all of your build and release activities. Any task that can be executed from a command prompt or an API call can be driven from IBM Rational Build Forge. Here is a partial list of tools our customers use in their environments:

Integration between source control and the build environment is critical to achieve an automated, iterative development process. IBM Rational Build Forge can perform automated code checkout from any source control system that offers a command line checkout option, including:

• IBM Rational ClearCase
• Borland StarTeam
• CA Harvest
• CVS (open source)
• Serena / Merant PVCS Version Manager
• Microsoft Visual SourceSafe
• MKS Integrity
• Perforce SCM
• Subversion (open source)

In some cases, development teams want changes in source control to initiate builds. IBM Rational Build Forge has developed application-specific adaptors that create a link between your source repositories and product builds. Custom adaptors are available for the following products:

• IBM Rational ClearCase
• IBM Rational ClearQuest
• CVS
• Perforce

IBM Rational Build Forge's architecture allows the system to communicate with virtually any application that employs a command line interface. Using the IBM Rational Build Forge agents, a command that is dispatched from the IBM Rational Build Forge Management Console executes the same way it would if you were typing the command on the physical machine. As a result, IBM Rational Build Forge can initiate a wide variety of processes to streamline build management and production deployment activities, including:

• Creating automated unit test suites
• Initiating test suites using third party testing tools
• Running third-party quality assessment tools
• Generating a wide variety of source code metrics
• Extracting documentation from source code commentary
• Burning CD/DVD's and generating PDF documentation
• Integrating with proprietary, internal systems

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