IBM Touts Jazz for Research

MONTREAL—IBM is pushing its Jazz developer collaboration technology as a research tool and has given money to some universities that are researching how to break down cultural and geographic barriers when developing software.

Eric Gamma, a lead architect on Jazz, announced the grants Oct. 24 at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications conference here.

Through Jazz Faculty Grants, universities are exploring the promise of global collaborative software development that taps into the skills and expertise of developers regardless of location. The IBM Jazz project is an open commercial community where IBM Rational customers, academics and partners can collaborate on the development of Jazz technology.

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Three universities were awarded the grants to help drive the software communitys ability to think beyond the individual developer to organizational productivity. The University of California, Irvine, is exploring the use of multi-monitor environments to improve project awareness and development practices. Two other awardees, the University of British Columbia and University of Victoria, both in Canada, are embracing the collaboration capabilities of Jazz and researching software development team interactions and communication.

To read about how IBM has Jazzed up collaboration, click here.

The University of British Columbia has launched a project called Emergent Teams. Because teams often form on an as-needed basis to solve particular problems, the university has introduced the Emergent Expertise Locator tool, built as an extension to the Jazz platform. Based on how files have changed in the past and who has participated in these changes, the Emergent Expertise Locator will recommend members of an emergent team for a particular task.

The University of Victoria has developed two prototypes based on Jazz—the Related Contributors Recommender and the Feature Awareness Team Explorer—which help to determine what software development team members are working on and keeping tabs on their involvement, expertise, and inter-issue dependencies.

The University of California, Irvine is exploring the use of multi-monitor environments and leveraging Jazz technology to explore how software development tools should be designed or re-designed to take advantage of this extra display space, with a particular focus on project awareness.

IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., also announced that some universities are using commercial products based on Jazz technology, such as IBM Rational Team Concert, in the classroom. The University of British Columbia is using IBM Rational Team Concert to provide students with a collaborative development environment that mirrors a real-world team setting. Given that, IBM will offer Rational Team Concert 1.0 for free to academic institutions to use in accredited course programs or academic research projects.

IBM did not disclose the financial amount of the grants, though a company spokesperson said each grant recipient will receive a monetary award to help with their proposal. IBM also said recipients are expected to conduct the research for a year, interact with the Jazz community through the community tools on jazz.net, share research results with the Jazz team and community, and disseminate research results through workshops, conferences and journals.

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