| [corona-dev] Some info on IBM's Jazz direction |
|
Some information on IBM’s Jazz, a proprietary
implementation of collaboration. Q&A: Rational
targets IT compliance needs, GM says
Heather Havenstein August
25, 2006 (Computerworld) Danny Sabbah, a 32-year veteran of IBM, has overseen the company's Rational
software unit since May 2005. In an interview with Computerworld this week, he spoke about the increasing pressure on
development organizations to implement mechanisms that can trace activities
throughout the software development life cycle. Without such capabilities,
users could fail audits for compliance with regulations such as the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Sabbah, Rational's general manager, also discussed the
unit's new Eclipse-based project, code-named Jazz, which aims to link the
various components of the software development life cycle and will eventually
become a framework for future Rational products. Excerpts
from the interview follow: What is
Rational doing to meet corporate demand for tools that can link disparate
development tools and include portfolio management capabilities? There was an era for a while focusing around client/server
computing, around individual developer productivity. Those are necessary
conditions, but at the end of the day, they are not sufficient conditions. If you start looking at the
pressures on software development in terms of compliance and flexibility and
its ability to integrate and be managed as a business process, in many
organizations you find that it's a mess. Some people are just trying to
survive. They are failing audits in financial organizations because they can't
show that the requirements that came in from the business analysts were traced
and documented all the way through the development to deployment or running of
code. When you multiply those problems with a development team that is
geographically distributed, those problems are even more intense. We have been trying to
revamp our product portfolio to strengthen it along the lines of governance,
geographically distributed development and compliance so it is auditable. Then
developers don't have to worry about that. They can let the tools deal with it.
What
types of changes have you made to address these issues? We introduced a bunch of enhancements to things like RequisitePro
[a requirements management tool] for things like compliance. We now have a
workflow and a process that manages quality, as opposed to just doing the
automation of testing. We're using our products together and continuing to put
in integration across our portfolio and our existing capabilities so they work
together for end-to-end life-cycle traceability and ease of development. The
traceability allows you to draw a path across the entire development life cycle
that satisfies audits. What
enhancements will you be making to your products? We have a demonstration project, called Jazz, that has been under
way for 18 months, built by the same team that built Eclipse. It is focused on
an integrated view of the life cycle of software and system development. It
shows what you could do if you had a fully integrated life cycle. You could
flow information from any particular change that you make in requirements or
code construction or test cases. Using an underlying common view of development
metadata, whenever a change is made, it flows through the entire life cycle,
and anyone who needs to be notified is notified instantly. We're using that
project as a design pattern for the evolution of our existing architecture. When do
you expect the Jazz capabilities to be added to other products? It will start to manifest benefits next year. We're trying to take
the architecture we have built around a coherent view of collaboration and
Web-centric clients and use that to unify all of our Web interfaces to all of
our products. The Rational ClearCase [version control tool] and ClearQuest
[defect-tracking tool] Web interfaces are being unified using this
architecture. The next time that you
see us release [a version of Rational's suite of tools for development teams],
we will be talking about how our experience with Jazz morphs even more
capabilities in our products and the way we interface to construction and
modeling tools. Every time we release something, we will talk about how we are
moving closer to that [Jazz] vision. |