I had a local installation of RTC/RQM/DNG* on my laptop at version 4.0.4 and decided to upgrade to 4.0.5. This is my first upgrade so I approached it with caution, although my fall back position was to uninstall, delete all traces and start again from scratch.There is a very helpful upgrade page on jazz.net that gives enough links to work through the upgrade. The first thing to get was the new version of the Installation Manager. Not too painful. Oddly, upgrading from 4.0.4 to 4.0.5 is not an Upgrade from the Installation Manager, but an Install of the new version and Migration of the data.
I struggled a little with connecting to the repositories, and in the end I downloaded the full repository as if for an install without internet connection. I have to admit to being a little impatient and not properly reading everything in full, so this may well me my fault. I also had a laptop that was misbehaving a little, and between my first try and the successful try I had a Blue Screen Of Death.
It is certainly worth reading the documentation, and for a production environment, I would say read it all very carefully. The help offers a selection of check boxes to describe the environment being upgraded, the Interactive Upgrade Guide, and then gives the appropriate help. This saves wading through all the documentation for irrelevant versions and configurations, making life MUCH easier – Thank you jazz team for this.
Coming from a background of DOORS which was trivially easy to upgrade – genuinely just a few minutes for the server and then just a few minutes more for the client (oh, but for EACH client), this was a more serious undertaking. However the client is just my web browser, so no impact there at all. I have talked people through DOORS upgrades in the past without having the tool in front of me, and been completely confident of the process, I cannot imagine doing this with a jazz team server.
Having done the Install of 4.0.5, I then had to manually move the database files from the old file structure to the new – the help gives the command line instructions, but I used my file explorer’s drag and drop facility.
Next is tinkering with the database set up, and this is done with a script from the command line, it obviously does a lot in the background and I am sure would be nerve-wracking in a production environment, at least for the first time. There is one script for the jazz team server, and then one for CCM, one for QM and one for RM.
Finally, the RM does not properly migrate on the script so there is an instruction for finishing the job from the web browser. Again this is all well documented and, at least in my case, ran very smoothly.
I would say, don’t rush the job, prepare carefully, take backups (no, really, do it), and read through the documentation carefully. I had a small database with just a few sample projects and there was noticeable time involved in each of the steps – I didn’t time it, but it was long enough to not want to watch, but not really long enough for coffee. I imagine that with more data this could take significant time. It is best if the upgrade is done by someone who understands the grubby bits of the underlying databases and operating system – I am sure it is possible without this understanding, but unlike DOORS classic, it does involve working with the command line and copying a database. More complicated deployments will likely have more complicated upgrades and this is best done by the experts.
After all that, I seem to have a working set up with the new version so I am happy.
*Rational Team Concert/Rational Quality Manager/DOORS Next Generation