Review of IBM’s New Collaborative Platform Jazz
Overview:
Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. It’s based on the client-server technology and manages the source management, build tools and promotes the team collaboration. In this way, IBM plans to use an open-source style process during the building of its forthcoming collaborative development product.
IBM released second beta of its development collaboration tool and, for the first time, made it broadly available from its Jazz.net site.
“It requires a fundamental rethinking of how we do development,” said Danny Sabbah, general manager of IBM Rational. “We’re no longer thinking about dealing with individual developer tools–that’s a given. What’s a lot more interesting is to better understand the whole software development process.”
Features:
- Team awareness and automation: Team members can see who else is logged in, what they are working on, and will automatically be notified of changes, inputs and milestones that impact their work.
- Process awareness and automation: A customized project process guides team work flow and automates process steps and checkpoints at varying degrees of rigor.
- Team build: Schedule and execute software build processes. Leverage multiple servers for rapid, cross-platform build processing. Create detailed bill of materials to guarantee build reproducibility.
- Collaboration features: Provides project-integrated presence and messaging.
- Work item tracking: Automatically creates and tracks progress of individual work items in accordance with team process and project rules.
- Software configuration management: Provides essential software version control, workspace management and parallel development support to individuals and teams.
Disadvantages:
- IBM’s Agile methodology really works well within small- and medium-sized teams. The question is, how do you scale it?
Conclusion:
Historically, development tools have focused primarily on making individual programmers more productive. But as software development becomes more complex, IBM, Microsoft and others have focused on making products that address the full development lifecycle, from gathering application requirements to testing.
Source: IBM
Filed under Open Source Platform