IBM aims to 'Jazz' up development with new tool, community

Computerworld -

IBM’s Rational Software unit today launched a technology called Jazz, which will be supported by a new developer community and is aimed at fostering the development of tools that bolster collaboration on large projects. At the same time, Rational will unveil the first Jazz-based product.

The Jazz.net Web portal was opened at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference in Orlando.

Developers will be able to use the site to offer IBM input on requirements, report bugs and tweak code posted there. But the site won’t be a truly open-source endeavor, because IBM will own any products built using its code, acknowledged Dave Locke, Rational’s director of offerings marketing.

IBM described Jazz as a follow-on to the popular Eclipse open-source project that it launched in 2001 and later turned over to the independent Eclipse Foundation. 

While Eclipse focused on improving individual developer productivity, Jazz zeroes in on all cycles of the development process and on supporting collaboration among development teams, IBM officials said. They added that the Jazz technology will eventually be incorporated into all Rational products.

Breaking Down Silos

Tony Callan, manager of architecture governance at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan, said he welcomed the Jazz project, noting that when developers working on different parts of a job work together, the overall project functions more efficiently. 

“How do you break those silos down to where everyone is working for a common purpose instead of being scattered?” Callan said. “You need to have tools that will work together to get the testing, requirements and design teams visibility into how things are going.” 

Ricardo Garcia, a director at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida Inc., said he expects Jazz to help address issues like managing parallel development processes, where collaboration is vital. 

“Jazz not only brings the communications channel inside the development platform, but it integrates everything,” Garcia said. “The integration with the complete workflow for the life cycle ... is a big improvement.”

Locke noted that IBM also plans to announce at the conference a beta version of the first product built with the Jazz technology. The product, IBM Rational Team Concert, is a plug-in for all Rational development tools that is designed to support collaboration among distributed agile development teams. 

Carey Schwaber, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said that Jazz will likely make it easier for Rational users to finally get the benefits of collaboration and the improved visibility into project status that IBM “has been promising for a long time.”

With Jazz, all users in