SANTA CLARA, Calif.-IBM is offering its Jazz collaborative development environment to universities to teach the next generation of developers how to work in a global software development environment.
IBM made its announcement March 17 at the EclipseCon conference here.
Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development life cycle.
“We’re letting the students use the same tools in the classroom as they will use in the real world,” said Robyn Gold, marketing manager for Jazz in IBM’s Rational business unit.
Products built on the IBM Jazz technology platform allow a global team of developers with offices in multiple countries to collaborate. Every year IBM awards universities with grants allowing up-and-coming developers to research software development team collaboration on a global scale, said Li-Te Cheng, IBM research scientist for collaborative application development.
Some universities are using commercial products based on Jazz technology, such as IBM Rational Team Concert, in the classroom, Cheng said. IBM Rational Team Concert is a collaborative environment designed to improve team productivity by enabling real-time communication and collaboration across a software delivery team. Also, several universities are using Rational Team Concert in the classroom to provide students with a real-world experience of working in large distributed teams.
Cheng said the most recently awarded IBM research grants include grants to Brown University to use Jazz in the classroom. IBM also extended a grant to Carnegie Mellon University to build capabilities to support coordination among developers, based on communication and dependency data in the Jazz environment. Other educational institutions receiving grants are the University of Calgary and Saarland University in Germany, Cheng said.
Free Tutorials, Software Courses
IBM officials said the company makes more than 1,200 free tutorials and more than 1,200 software technology downloads available to students through its developerWorks site, plus additional resources for course material and curricula development to faculty through its Academic Initiative.
Also, through ibm.com/university, IBM offers more than 250 course modules on software topics to 2,400-plus member schools, including 56 courses on Rational software with many more new courses being added soon, all of which are available at no cost. In 2008, IBM is offering more than 200 in-person faculty training sessions and workshops on topics including software development, open-source initiatives, security, software testing, software architecture and design.
IBM also recently announced its first software Innovation and Collaboration Lab on the Rochester Institute of Technology campus in Rochester, N.Y. This new lab will further provide future software developers with real-world Web-based technologies that better enable collaboration across global economies.