Jazz and the Eclipse Way of Collaboration

To improve collaboration in software development teams, IBM Research and IBM Rational software engineers have been working on the Jazz project. Jazz sets out to define a vision for the way products can integrate to support collaborative work, and to create a technology platform on which to build products to deliver on this vision. It focuses on developing better team-building strategies, managerial processes, architectural designs, collaborative coding techniques, and software development practices. Jazz aims to be a scalable platform that can integrate tasks across the software life cycle. As such, it will consist of a set of plug-ins to Eclipse, IBM´s Java-based, extensible open source development platform. Unlike Eclipse, however, which seeks to increase individual programmers´ productivity, Jazz aims to make teams and teams of teams more productive. By building on prior experience with Eclipse, Jazz´s developers hope to address IBM customers´ evolving application-development requirements.