Jazz BOF at CASCON
October 26th, 2007 by Kamal AhluwaliaIn my previous posts I had touched upon an important challenge facing Microsoft and IBM as they introduce “game-changing” integrated ALM offerings. How does one go about convincing IT decision makers to start adopting this ALM infrastructure. Outreach activities and a thriving partner eco-system is one of the ways to get the idea out in the open. One example of this is the Jazz team’s attempt to showcase their offerings at the prestigious CASCON 07. This collection of researchers and academics is a fertile seeding ground for advancing the state of art in these concepts.
Yesterday, I attended a BOF session by Marcellus Mindel that discussed opportunities for using Jazz in an academic setting. There was a good discussion on the challenges instructors face in deploying and using Jazz in a curriculum. One of the questions was on curriculum pre-requisites on using Jazz. Do you use Jazz in a first year course before students are aware of the software engineering processes and practices or do you introduce it in fourth year when they have had a chance to get a grounding on some of these practices in addition to essential technical knowhow? Integrated ALM tools like VSTS and Jazz can be an excellent project simulators where instructors can use different process templates to give challenging assignments (a lot like using case studies). Of course, someone may choose to use the ALM tools simply to encourage collaboration between students as they work on their assignments. There were other discussions around research into areas relating to process templates, reporting and generating best practices by using enactment data – all of the concepts that I am passionate about and have blogged in the past.
Later we had a chance to visit the exhibitor area and chat with the IBM Rational Team Concert folks from the Toronto Lab. For those who don’t know, IBM’s Toronto Lab is one of the important brain trusts collaborating on the Jazz/Team Concert platform/product. We wish them our best as they continue to ramp up their outreach activities and aim for the general availability of IBM Rational Team Concert sometime middle of next year.
Here is the Osellus team at the Jazz booth - notice we are appropriately geared !
From left to right - Dave, Payman, Me, Kartik (IBM), Rakesh, Jim, Jason
October 27th, 2007 at 9:50 am
[...] full story here [...]
October 27th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I think JAZZ is laking quite a few features, it seems it needs still a lots of research as in the session the presenters were confused during the question answer sessions. I did try to log in while in the session as JAZZ is not that user friendly, I was rejected entry in there site. For the time being it seems it will take another few years to get developed.
It was nice meeting Kamal and having a chit chat about different points of interest about modelling techniques and technologies such as OPM (Object Process Methodology).
October 28th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
@Atif,
I don’t know about that. I assume you are talking about the BoF session since that was the only session with a Q&A session.
Jazz definitely has some gaps that need to be addressed to be anywhere near maturity but I think it is built for extensibility and the focus of that session was to get a community for identifying precisely such gaps going amongst educational institutions.
The clarity on the “openness” of the platform is admittedly missing - an important aspect if you want a true community around a platform but that’s just my opinion.
I thought the presenters were pretty knowledgeable in their particular domains in the JAZZ ecosystem but perhaps the product mgmt. and process perspectives were missing in that session.
October 28th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
[...] were quite a few of us Ossies at Cascon (see Kamal’s post) and I think we all agreed that Jazz and Team Concert were a pretty impressive debut effort by IBM [...]