IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced on June 11th its vision for community driven development and introduced new software to help clients drive greater visibility, business intelligence and collaboration in software delivery projects. The roadmap, unveiled at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference in Orlando, Florida, centers around IBM's software development portfolio which helps geographically and/or organizationally distributed development teams collaborate in real time.
Historically, software development and delivery has been a closed process limited to in-house skills and software development tools that have focused on making individual developers more productive. Today, software development is becoming more complex with the actual development happening with offshore teams and/or business partners in different locations. Managing projects that span geographic and organizational boundaries is emerging as one of the top software delivery challenges. Enabling greater team agility and alignment with evolving business requirements also compounds the challenge. IBM is helping clients gain intelligence from their software assets and increase global project efficiency and insight, through its open transparent approach to community development.
IBM is announcing new offerings to help geographically distributed development teams collaborate, lower the total cost of global software delivery, and deliver software to market faster than ever before. The new Web-centric, lower bandwidth software helps customers reduce overhead costs of deploying a client technology, and allows outsourced members of development teams to participate in software delivery projects more easily.
-- IBM Rational Team Concert, beta 1 -- the first offering developed on
the Jazz technology platform, IBM Rational Team Concert is a collaborative
portal designed to improve team productivity by enabling real-time
collaboration across a software delivery team. The new software is
optimized for Agile development teams in mid- and large-sized businesses
and can extend IBM Rational's leading change and release management
solutions Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest. In the future, IBM expects to
deliver a family of IBM Rational Team Concert offerings, and extensions to
existing IBM products, that enrich the collaborative nature of the IBM
Rational Software Delivery platform.
-- IBM Rational Asset Manager 7.0 -- generally available on June 29,
2007, this new software provides visible intelligence into software assets
and how they are consumed in a collaborative environment. IBM Rational
Asset Manager is a registry of design, development and deployment related
assets, such as codes, patterns and tests, and allows organizations to
reduce development cost and time; securely communicate across disparate
global teams and eliminate rework with asset-traceability and utilization
monitoring; and accelerate service delivery.
-- IBM Rational ClearCase 7.01 -- the latest version helps improve
developer productivity and security. By managing and controlling the
assets needed when developing software, Rational ClearCase helps clients
isolate data based on the location of a user. For example, in some
countries there are export control regulations which prevent users from
working on certain aspects of code. Clients who may have both an in-house
development team and outsourced the development of specific software
deliverables, can now isolate data in a secure way to ensure that remote
teams only have access to the assets they need. IBM Rational ClearCase
7.01 helps clients with global projects monitor these critical situations.
-- IBM Rational Portfolio Manager 7.1 -- the recently announced project
and portfolio management offering has a new Ajax-based Web interface that
allows team members to manage their work, submit time and expense reports.
With more than 22,000 software developers in 61 locations around the globe, IBM knows first hand that global development is hard. Utilizing shared best practices is critical to delivering a project on schedule. The development teams from the IBM Lab in Bangalore, India, and the IBM Lab in Lexington, MA, have captured their collective experiences and published a Redbook titled "Global Development and Delivery -- based on the experiences of the Rational India Lab." This Redbook discusses common challenges in geographically distributed development environments and the steps IBM took to tailor IBM Rational tools to solve these problems through case study examples. IBM has also created a plug-in offering focused on geographically distributed development for IBM Rational Method Composer 7.2, a process for helping developers deliver customized yet consistent software development projects. Today, IBM Rational Method Composer is used by more than 1,300 organizations worldwide.
Collaboration drives community-driven development
The Jazz Project is an open commercial community designed to improve team agility and collaboration. Today IBM announced that it is opening up http://www.Jazz.net for IBM Rational partners, IBM Rational customers, the 2,700+ IBM Rational Software Development Conference attendees, and select others in the global software development community providing access to IBM's Jazz platform project. At Jazz.net, customers can transparently collaborate with IBM and each other, provide input on requirements, report bugs and ultimately contribute to the development of IBM's industry-leading software delivery platform. By opening up the software development community as a transparent software supply chain, the Jazz.net community will drive the evolution of standards and common components incorporated in future IBM software releases.
"Open commercial software development is the next major innovation in collaborative engineering," said Dr. Danny Sabbah, general manager, IBM Rational Software. "IBM is taking software development to a new level, and through participation in the Jazz.net community, customers can influence the products they depend on for software delivery."
To jump-start the collaborative development process at Jazz.net, IBM has posted several incubator projects focused on code analysis, requirements management and other aspects of Agile software development projects. IBM is encouraging the greater software development community to collaborate on these projects, and the Rational Team Concert beta. -IBM
