Celebrating Another Year of Rocket.Build

Overview

It’s that time of year again! With September in the books, we’ve wrapped up our eleventh year of one of our favorite pastimes—Rocket.Build. What started out as our small version of a hackathon in 2014 has blossomed into one of our most anticipated events. Every year, Rocket.Build sees Rocketeers from a variety of roles and job functions teaming up to cross-collaborate and create projects that improve processes, enhance Rocket Software solutions, or solve customer problems.

This year we brought together over 500 Rocketeers from 11 regions and 18 different countries who submitted 167 projects spanning just about every use case and technological application imaginable. Every project at Rocket.Build mapped back to one of the three themes we set forward for participants:

• Team Excellence: Projects that fall under this theme are designed to help build high-performing teams and help make Rocket Software a top-tier workplace.
• Artificial Intelligence: These projects brought new and creative uses of AI to the competition, doing everything from optimizing existing products or improving customer experience.
• Your Big Ideas: This category encourages products to leverage diverse collaboration to help further express Rocket Software’s core values, promote our modernization solutions, or identify areas for cross-product integration.

The submissions we received did not disappoint. With one of our themes centered on AI, we were excited to see that of our 16 finalists, 13 of those projects were AI-related. And while the competition brought forth a vast number of innovative, passionate, and incredibly promising builds, there were a few that stood out with our judges as winners. Let’s take a look at those initiatives:

• Best Presentation: The winner of this award was the team responsible for the Machine Learning Incubator. This project incorporated an innovative approach to AI aimed at increasing customer engagement to help mature AI models.
• One Rocket Award: Next up was the team that developed the Smart Assistant for Legal Information & Extraction project—or SALIE, for short. This project enhanced the capabilities of existing Rocket Software tools, taking the indexing abilities of Rocket^® Mobius^® and leveraging them with AI to help find and interpret legal documents across the organization.
• Rocket Values Award: This award went to the team that developed the AI-Generated Code Review to Meet Rocket Standards. This team built a project that closely aligned with Rocket Software’s values and recognized the critical importance of meeting code standards. The result of this project is a script that can verify whether all rules are being followed and, if not, report which changes should be made.

Now, let’s highlight the projects that walked away as the first, second, and third-place winners.

• Third Place (Tie): Tied for third among the finalists, the Smart Assistant – Intelligent Document Generation project harnesses AI to generate stories, test cases, and documentation from any well-written Epic, following a standard template. The tool offers a major boost to productivity and does away with tedious manual steps every product owner and scrum master at Rocket Software has encountered in some form.
• Third Place (Tie): Our other third-place finisher was the project Unleashing the Power of the Console. Developed by Rocket Software’s Vilnius community, this tool can meet users wherever they are, enhance efficiency in a variety of ways, and improve the overall quality of work.
• Second Place: In second place we had the Rocket Content Intelligence Explorer. This team brought together two Rocket Software products, Rocket^® Mobius^® and Rocket^® Data Intelligence, building a custom Rocket^® Mobius^® scanner with a ready-to-use user interface, including access through Rocket Content Smart Chat.
• First Place: Finally, the winner of this year’s Rocket.Build was the project Db2 Connect AI Health Check Assistant and Anomaly Detection. This team set out to solve a real-world problem for Db2 connect users – detecting performance, stability, security, and configuration anomalies using WatsonX.

The enthusiasm and passion we saw during this year’s event were a testament to every Rocketeer’s hard work and we can’t wait to host it again next year! Learn more about Rocket.Build and the exciting projects past events have brought.