All that Jazz

In today's software development environment, development teams are no longer neatly located all together, but increasingly are spread across the globe. Geographical distribution of development organizations is inevitable, according to Forrester, because of outsourcing, offshoring, and mergers and acquisitions. Organizations driven by market pressures for responsiveness are at the same time demanding agility and responsiveness from their development teams, and distributed teams must be as responsive and effective as teams who are located together. On top of this, organizations are also demanding more effective governance of their software development delivery processes. So how can development teams cope?

IBM Rational Software and IBM Research are working together to develop new technology to improve collaboration across the development lifecycle. Called Jazz, this project takes inspiration from jazz music in which individually skilled musicians collaborate to create innovative results. Jazz technology will be used in Rational products to enable distributed teams of software developers to collaborate and integrate their work regardless of their location. The Jazz technology will extend the governing capability of the Rational Software Development Platform to help development teams build software even more effectively.

The Jazz project embodies IBM's leadership in the software development space by extending beyond individual developer productivity to team productivity, helping the entire team to communicate and work together more effectively.

What it means

The Jazz technology aims to change the way elements of a software development project, called artifacts, are managed across the development lifecycle. Examples of artifacts are change requests, project updates, project scheduling details, models, and source code, all of which are frequently altered as a development team creates a new product or solution. Jazz allows these artifacts to be managed more effectively by providing accurate real-time project health information drawn directly from actual project work, and lets development teams collaborate in real time in the context of the work that they are doing.

At a practical level, this means that the Jazz technology will help development teams fine-tune requirements, by helping to assess the impact of changing a requirement on the overall development process, to determine what needs to change and who needs to change it. At an organizational management level, this means that managers, as well as development team members, can view statistics that reflect the overall health and viability of projects, such as whether development projects are over or under budget, whether they are on or off schedule, and the number of developers working on the project.

What's coming

Early prototypes of the Jazz technology were demonstrated at the recent Rational Software Development Conference 2006, and a more extensive public technology preview is currently in development. The Jazz project will continue to be a joint-technology endeavor between Rational and IBM Research through 2008, and plans are underway for incorporation into the Rational family of products in the next two years.

The Jazz technology will be the basis for new products down the line, and it will complement, not replace, existing products such as Rational ClearCase and Rational ClearQuest. While the Jazz technology is in an early stage, it is an important part of Rational's strategy for advancing the discipline of software and systems development.