developerWorks: This is a developerWorks podcast. I'm Scott Laningham. Joining me to talk about the beta 2 release of Rational Team Concert are three very instrumental individuals in Rational Team Concert and the Jazz story. Lee Nackman is Rational vice president of product development and customer support. Welcome, Lee.

Nackman: It's great to be here, Scott.

developerWorks: Mike O'Rourke is director for Rational team products, including ClearCase®, ClearQuest®, Build Forge®, and the newly introduced Rational Team Concert — our first Jazz-based product. Welcome, Mike.

O'Rourke: Glad to be here, Scott.

developerWorks: Also joining is John Wiegand, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Rational chief architect. John is responsible for defining the architectural and implementation aspects of Jazz as a platform for use in products across the software life cycle. Good to have you on, John.

Wiegand: Good morning, Scott.

developerWorks: Well, we've talked about Jazz on this podcast recently. Karnik Kanakasabasin talked about it within the context of Rational Team Concert, giving us just a brief introduction to the two. But I'm wondering, Lee, starting off here, coming from the overview perspective that you have on this, if you would give us a sense of what Jazz means and the overall Rational story and sort of what the motivation has been for Jazz.

Nackman: Sure. Jazz is an exciting initiative that we've been working on for a couple of years now. And its goal is to provide a technology platform for much greater integration across the kinds of things that developers and software delivery people have to do to actually deliver software, to deliver on time and with good quality. If you look at what has happened in the past in the industry, we've developed individual tools and then after developing those individual tools, we've tried to figure out how to make them work together so they can be used across the whole sequence of activities that development organizations have to do.

The truth is that the kind of integrations we've been able to achieve in the industry have not met the expectations of what our customers have wanted. So Jazz is really an initiative to turn this around and to say, "Look, instead of designing a bunch of individual tools, let's design an infrastructure that provides basic services that will allow different kinds of capability to be implemented that work together through this infrastructure." You design that and then you build individual capabilities that work in that context. So it's really turning the story on end compared to what we've done in the past.

So this Jazz infrastructure provides a vision and a technology base for a change in the Rational product line over a multi-year period where we make dramatic improvements in the kinds of capabilities that we bring to the development community.

This is going to unfold in several ways. First of all, you'll see the use of the Jazz technology base to make significant enhancements to our existing product line. And you'll see that unfold starting in 2008 and moving forward. You'll also see us introduce completely new products based on the Jazz technology. The Rational Team Concert Express product is going to be the first of those new products. And I'll leave it to Mike to talk in more detail about what that product actually provides. So the big news here is that we're entering the second beta release for Rational Team Concert and also that we are opening up access to the entire community to Jazz.net, which is the place where we're actually doing the development of both the Jazz technology and the Rational Team Concert Express product. We'll talk more about Jazz.net as we continue this podcast.

developerWorks: Is the idea with the term Jazz —, I assume it must be related to what you're talking about not only working together but working together in almost real-time sort of like the improvisation aspect of Jazz?

Nackman: Exactly so. It's intended to evoke that whole way of making music that Jazz musicians have done where you do have structure, you do have organizations, but you have a lot of improvisation. You have a lot of collaboration, a lot of back and forth that goes on among the musicians. And we see that in successful software projects, you have that same kind of combination of structure, plus the ability to have a lot of improvisational collaboration.

developerWorks: I guess that's in contrast to like Milli Vanilli lip-synching or something. [LAUGHTER] Hey, Mike, now mentioning Rational Team Concert Express. I know we're talking about it as the first product on the Jazz technology platform. Talk about Rational Team Concert and how it relates to Jazz, if you would.

O'Rourke: Sure. First of all, what we're announcing today is the second in a stream of beta releases of Rational Team Concert with an expected release middle of 2008. What Team Concert Express or Team Concert really is is the first offering to be delivered on top of that Jazz platform. Now, in addition to the Jazz core platform, we're also adding, if you will, application technologies in the work item, source control, and build space that deliver collaborative capabilities across that application life cycle.

So for instance, one of the things that people always want to be able to do is, let's say, for instance, you have a new defect that comes in. You want your team to be notified of that defect. You want that defect, as it works through the life cycle, for people to be able to reference it or change it in chat sessions. You want that defect to be tied to a specific set of source code artifacts, and you want to know when it's fixed, what build it was fixed in, and again, what artifacts and what developers were associated with that.

Team Concert Express, built on top of the Jazz platform, gives you that capability and gives it to you in the context of the work that you're doing. So you don't have to go searching for it, you don't have to wait for a report; it's always there right in front of you.

developerWorks: Very cool. Now, can you talk a little bit about what this means for existing Rational customers? Lee talked about this a little bit, but I'm wondering just from the point of the other Rational products and how they relate to the Jazz technology platform.

O'Rourke: Sure. It relates, as Lee mentioned, in really two ways. So Team Concert Express itself, as I mentioned, it has build, it has work item, and it has source control capabilities. We already have a couple of products -- ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Build Forge -- which also have those abilities.

Team Concert Express not only provides those capabilities but provides for you to have a two-way communication between your current enterprise products, and this lower end capability initially geared for the small to medium businesses. So what that means is you'll be able to do things like rebase or start a new project, complete with the source code artifacts, as well as the work items in the build already associated with that in your enterprise products. So there's a very deep, tight integration there for those products today with Team Concert Express.

Now as we move forward, those exact same products will be using more and more of the Jazz platform, such that over time, they'll actually be first class Jazz products, if you will, so that they'll be completely based on the Jazz technology. And this kind of seamless integration that I've talked about between work items, and builds and source control will happen automatically as opposed to having some of the more brittle integrations and kind of separate repositories that many tools have today.

developerWorks: So customers — existing customers — should view this as a natural evolution of Rational and not something that's going on kind of parallel to what they've been involved in, then?

O'Rourke: Exactly right. It's an evolution for them if they're currently Rational products. It's a revolution if they're not and they want to move on to a platform today like Team Concert Express that gives you those capabilities today.

Nackman: Sometimes I like to think of it or describe it as revolutionary technology introduced in an evolutionary way. And for our existing customers, I think that's what they'll see, and for some of our new customers, they can take a bigger jump, if you will, into the Team Concert world.

developerWorks: Very good. Now, John — we should get you in here now. I'm wondering if you might talk a bit about the underlying architecture with the Jazz technology platform. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff there to hear about.

Wiegand: When we set out to build the Jazz technology so we could enable these products to be built, we had two or three aspects that we cared about significantly. One, we wanted to build a scalable solution so we could address the needs of our customers, both from smaller customers and smaller projects through very large-scale projects. We wanted to build a system that's modular — that's a selfish thought — so that we could build the pieces in a controlled way. But we also wanted it to be extensible so that our customers can add the set of tools that makes sense to them in their environment. So rather than having a closed set of capabilities or just an individual product, rather, we can add new capabilities.

So with those characteristics in mind, we looked at the architecture of the Web and said, "That's a good way to go about doing things." So we decided to exploit open Web standards in many regards. So we built it in such a way that we can leverage open Web standards, so we leverage open source technologies, but also commercial middleware as well. So we can leverage Apache Derby as our database. We can exploit Tomcat. We can build on the Equinox runtime underneath. We have access to communication protocols. Sorry for the jargon, but it shows we use different technologies. We have Jabber underneath. So these are all things we can use — these open source technologies — but because of the configurability approach that we took to building this technology, we can also leverage DB2® or Oracle databases.

We can build on top of WebSphere® when we want the additional scalability that can provide. We can exploit Lotus® Sametime® if that's what the customer is looking to using. So the technologies that make sense can be used to get us to the right place.

developerWorks: So obviously, open source projects, a very important aspect of what's going on with the Jazz platform then, isn't it?

Wiegand: Absolutely. I drew attention to several there, but there's even more at Apache. There's full-text indexing support that we get through Lucene, a very common indexing mechanism. And we also see, just another set of open source technologies that we're using, is we know that several of our customers are using Subversion, and we've provided a bridging technology that lets them use Subversion and at the same time take advantage of the capabilities that the Jazz technology provides.

Just like we've talked about our open source and commercial technology choices in contrast with using Subversion we also support integrating ClearCase. And we support that in a connector style, and that's one of our primary supported configurations.

developerWorks: So, John, it's plug and play with the platform is a real goal here, is really what we 're trying to achieve. Am I getting that?

Wiegand: You're hearing that exactly right. The thought, again, is that it's not a fixed set of tools. It's an extensible set of tools. You customize your environment over time to have the tools that make sense in your environment.

developerWorks: Let me ask a question now to all three of you and just kind of jump in there any time you want. I've heard the term open commercial software development and even transparent development. And I wonder if you all could talk about what you mean by that and why it's important.

Nackman: Sure. Let me start out. So we've been building the technology at Jazz.net, the technology both for the Jazz platform, as well as the technology for Rational Team Concert Express itself — the product.

One of the things that's very exciting about what we're doing here is that we're taking advantage of many of the things that open source projects have learned. We have public work item lists that people can use to observe what the development team is doing. They can work with various milestone drivers, and they can get feedback by creating new work items. So they have access to all the information that the development team has. That's what we mean by transparent. People can actually see the real live development process, and they can participate in it.

That's in contrast to the usual kind of interaction that you have where every once in a while, a vendor puts out a press release about how their software development project is going, and you can more or less believe and understand what they're saying. So here it's completely open and transparent in that perspective.

developerWorks: I see.

Nackman: People also have the opportunity to give us substantial feedback and to engage with the developers in discussions about where we're going. So it provides a way that people can have influence on where the products are going. Maybe John could comment a little bit on how this is actually working in practice.

Wiegand: The part I like to focus on is not just seeing what's happening today, so seeing the code as it's developed and being able to run it, which is very important. But this ability to see the intent of the project and the plans of the project and then influence them and the accountability that comes with that, as well, which is to see how the delivery maps to the intent. And we found significant value in this. It's been a good practice for the development team for us to be more crisp about exactly what we're doing. And we've appreciated the feedback we've received as well from the community, as they've both raised issues about other things that they saw were important -- that's very valuable to us because it helps us adjust our plans -- but also support; when they said these are important characteristics, we really like this.

At the end of an iteration, in addition to saying "Here's what we intend to do," at the end of the iteration, we come back with a new and noteworthy where we describe what actually took place and some of the end-user capabilities to basically close the loop on that iteration as we get ready for the next one.

developerWorks: I'm thinking you all must really feel like pioneers, in a sense, working with this new model.

O'Rourke: Yes. I think it's very exciting. You can think of innovation in products and in technology. I think this is innovation in the way that we're developing commercial products. And so far, the initial response has been very positive. One of the exciting things that's happening now is that we've limited the participation at Jazz.net to Rational and IBM customers, but we're now opening it up to anybody who wants to participate. And so we're increasing the scale of this experiment, of this innovation to the world. And so I think that's going to be very exciting to see how that unfolds.

developerWorks: You know, a question that comes to mind around this is what was the discussion like, or how big of a decision was it, to do this as open commercial software development? I mean, was there a sense of it being at all risky? Or what was that like?

Nackman: Well, I think it was actually a very interesting discussion. We all understand the benefits that come from the transparency that exists from the open source projects. And we wanted to get the same benefits as we apply these techniques to our commercial product development. And in particular, our experience working as part of Eclipse has reinforced to us how important this level of transparency actually is in practice. So conceptually, it was an easy thing to think about. But then you start to say, "Well, we're building this new core technology, and it's going to be part of a major evolution of the Rational product set, as well as introducing these new products, and we're going to actually expose that development to the world as we do it?" So that's where the scary part comes into it.

But then as we went back to our principles for Rational, part of what Rational is about is trying to build community and trying to build open communities. And this fits so well with that fundamental principle that guides Rational that we decided this is a risk we should take. So it is an experiment, but I think it's a very exciting one.

Wiegand: From the development point of view, it's exciting as well. There's a contrast between the accountability, that's very visible that the individual developers have, and the responsibility that comes with it. This is really neat, in that we take responsibility for the commitments we've made. Everyone can see that. And then as we deliver, the results confirm our reputation. It works together very well.

And then, in addition, we're not in it alone because the community as a whole is providing feedback and helping us get to the right place. So we get the community aspects, getting to a greater place than we would have individually, and then we get the visibility and the engagement opportunity.

developerWorks: So bringing the whole thing full circle, back to that concept of Jazz, it's about a great ensemble and not just one guy going on forever on a sax solo then.

Nackman: Absolutely. [LAUGHTER]

Wiegand: So anyone who chooses to participate can go to Jazz.net, register, and then download the beta 2, and try it out, provide feedback on it, look at the plans or Rational Team Concert Express and see what's going to be still done, look at new enhancements they'd like to see made, provide feedback of various sorts and experience it — not just use it.

Nackman: I don't think we've explicitly said it, but one of the other exciting things here is, the source code's there, too. This is not just looking at the plans. If people really want to understand more deeply, they have access to source code.

developerWorks: That's great. I'm wondering, as part of these closing thoughts here, if there are other getting started with Jazz and Rational Team Concert Express things you guys want to mention — other resources or other Web sites that they need to be checking out? I know developerWorks has a space on Jazz that they've launched, and are there others that we should be mentioning here?

O'Rourke: I think Jazz.net is where it really all comes together, so that would be the one place. If there's one place we would point people, it would be Jazz.net.

developerWorks: Lee Nackman, Mike O'Rourke, and John Wiegand, thank you all for making time for this today. It was very enjoyable.

Nackman: Thanks, Scott. It was great fun.

O'Rourke: Thanks, Scott. Appreciate it.

Wiegand: Enjoyed it. Take care.

developerWorks: Again, visit Jazz.net for more information, as well as the developerWorks expert space on Jazz. Find that at ibm.com/developerworks/spaces. This has been a developerWorks podcast. I'm Scott Laningham. Thanks for listening.

Resources

• Jazz.net
  
  
• Rational zone on developerWorks
  
  
• Jazz community space on developerWorks
  
  
• Podcast blog
  
  

About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

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