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| Jazz is IBM Rational’s new technology platform for collaborative software delivery. Uniquely attuned to global and distributed teams, the Jazz platform is designed to transform how people work together to build software—making software delivery more collaborative, productive and transparent. You can think of Jazz technology as an extensible framework that dynamically integrates and synchronizes people, processes and assets associated with software development projects.
Jazz technology enables collaboration among business stakeholders, subject matter experts, and all of the relevant people that have a role to play in the successful delivery of software – not just software professionals. This represents a transformational leap in the value of software delivery teams, as these teams can now make software a focal point for driving innovation across the enterprise.
Jazz is a technology platform, not a product. Product offerings that are built on the Jazz platform will be able to leverage a rich set of capabilities for team-based software development and delivery. The Rational Team Concert family, comprising Rational Team Concert Express-C, Express and Standard editions, will be the first set of offerings built on Jazz technology. |
Imagine you are part of global team of developers with offices in multiple countries spanning several time zones. Or you are part of a small, local team divided by differing work schedules or department affiliations. In either case, you collaborate with business analysts, architects, developers, testers, lawyers, business stakeholders and other subject matter experts separated by time, distance or organization. What type of infrastructure would help you do your best work, both individually and as a team? The Jazz technology platform is designed to answer these needs. Products built on the Jazz platform will help team members to:
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Collaborate in context. Jazz technology tracks and manages the relationships between artifacts, promotes sound development processes, and gathers project information automatically and unobtrusively to deliver unprecedented lifecycle integration.
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Right-size governance. The Jazz platform empowers teams to capture, share and automate best practices at varying degrees of rigor. You can easily fine-tune your governance process over time—avoiding the need to define everything up front. You can also vary process flexibility over the lifespan of a project to promote early-stage experimentation and late-stage stabilization. Built-in process awareness and automation makes it easy for both individuals and teams to “do the right thing” and “do things right”.
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Deliver day-one productivity. Jazz platform has been designed to facilitate straightforward set up and dynamic provisioning of new team members and projects. Once teams and projects are set up, you can easily plan iterations, balance work loads, and dynamically modify the team’s collective workstream. This streamlined onboarding provides organizations with the flexibility they need to respond more quickly to business needs and leverage business and technical talent wherever it is located.
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Choose your own path. Jazz technology is built on open Web and OSGi standards. Its open and extensible architecture is designed to give you the flexibility to assemble your own software delivery platform, relying on your preferred vendors and solutions. Jazz is architected to enable a broad range of clients. Jazz has an open middleware interface, which means you will be able to install Jazz-based products using open source middleware, such as Tomcat™, Derby, and Jabber®; commercial middleware from IBM WebSphere®, DB2® and Lotus®; or even third-party products from vendors such as Oracle.®.
Now in open rehearsal: IBM Rational Team Concert
IBM Rational Team Concert will be the first product family to be delivered on the Jazz technology platform. Now available as beta software, Rational Team Concert includes integrated work item, source control and build management support. It will give agile teams the experience of a highly collaborative development environment, optimized for small and medium-sized teams.
Rational Team Concert will make it easy to exchange information directly in the context of the work you are doing. For example, if an enhancement request were changed, you and other team members would automatically be notified of the change. You could easily reference the change in chat sessions—pointing to the exact artifact. And business stakeholders could be informed automatically of status on changes they care about.
Rational Team Concert Standard will come with out-of-the-box integrations that enable interoperability with Rational ClearCase, ClearQuest, Build Forge and Subversion change management products. These are designed to expand your flexibility and enable efficient small team experimentation within a broader enterprise environment.
Join the Jazz jam session
The Jazz technology platform is being developed using a new approach called open commercial software development. Unlike traditional commercial processes where customers have little visibility into a new product or release until it is shipped, Jazz development takes place openly at jazz.net. You can see the development as it progresses and download builds as they are available. The benefit of this transparency is that it allows you and other customers to become part of a continuous feedback loop that drives development decisions. By providing your feedback early and often, you can influence release direction and priorities before these decisions are locked down.
To participate in the development of Jazz and Rational Team Concert or to download the beta of Rational Team Concert, please visit jazz.net. The Rational Team Concert family is scheduled for availability in June 30, 2008.
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