A Love Supreme?
Yesterday afternoon I sat in on two sessions on IBM Jazz. This incredibly ambitious project aims to break through the functional silos between the tools commonly used by developers: source code control, bug tracking, automated build, agile planning and development process support. It also exposes all these tools through Eclipse with an integrated user interface. At the core of this approach is a unified data model and central repository that stores all development artifacts, from source code, definitions of teams, projects, milestones, executable development process definitions etc. There was some talk of connectors to external systems (such as bi-directional synchronization for SVN) but my impression was that you would not get the same unified Jazz experience in a heterogeneous environment.
The process section of the demo was impressive — allowing a project leader to define the artifacts, roles, permissions and allowable state transitions for development artifacts. For example, during the demo the development process prevented a developer from submitting code without referencing a bug report during a stabilization iteration, submitting code with unused package imports or code that contained strings that were not localizable (externalized). Process definitions are defined in XML documents and are hierarchical, allowing a sub-team to specialize its development process while still adhering to the process of its parent team. Jazz supplies a couple of process definition templates, including one that models the “Eclipse Way” process used by the Eclipse Foundation as well as the Scrum development process.
Of course — the $1M question, how much will it all cost? Jazz is not open source and given the functional breadth of the offering you’ve got to imagine it is going to be pricey. Can it displace Rational ClearCase et al for large IBM shops — almost certainly. Can it displace SVN+Jira/Bugzilla+XPlanner/Rally for cost sensitive companies? Unlikely.
March 19th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Since i’m a clearcase user, I have to say CC is a huge piece of junk. It is overly complicated when working with multiple streams. My own bias is towards SVN + Jira or something similar to that. CC is ok, when there’s only 1 stream. The main downside with CC is that it doesn’t work well over remote connections like VPN. The speed of CC is a dog over VPN and getting it to work well requires a lot of effort and maintenance.
It’s nice that IBM is actively exploring ways to make the development process simpler and easier. I hope they succeed with JAZZ and throw CC out with the trash.