Jazz

Today I am going to move from the usual coding subjects to something more related to process. I guess that the Rational suite is well know for most of us, together with the Rational suite there is the Unified Process concept (in a creational point of view: first the man created the Unified Process, he looked and it was not that good, then he created the RUP and it was ok, but the desire for more make him create the Rational suite – and now he is ashamed for the rest of his life).

I am not here to discuss the quality of the Rational Suite (which I am not a fan) or the Unified Process (which I am sure is misunderstand process), but I want to bring to you a new initiative from IBM the Jazz.

According to the IBM Jazz website, this initiative could be define as: "…Jazz is an initiative to transform software delivery by making it more collaborative, productive and transparent, through integration of information and tasks across the phases of the software lifecycle".

Jazz is a set of concepts and, of course, a group of IBM products; you can think about those products as an evolution of some Rational products. But in this case I guess with some major differences (in the direction of the Sun): it has an open source architecture, which means that you can plug any external software to work with it (open ground to open source software) and it has a community portal. The portal has a lot of information, so you do not get stuck with some guru-guys saying what should be done and what not, no more high cost guys or information blockage. I am not saying that everything is for free, but the community can grow by itself.

A nice set of products, the community process is not new, but is always good to see people getting into it, mainly in the area of process where the community idea is not really easy to accept. But the most important part, in my humble point of view, is the move to some agile process. You absolutely do not see anything in the Jazz.net saying about Scrum, Agile, and so on, that is absolutely true – what is ok because it is just products and you can use it with the process that you like most.

If you watch the videos in the portal you will notice what I am talking about. For example this video: the Collaborative ALM Demo – The Jazz Revolution tells a nice story that has a happy end because of the Jazz. But is it true? I don't think so; I have counted 2 times the agile word, 2 times continuum integration and 14 times the Iteration word, plus N points in this iteration and so on. If it is not something similar to Scrum I don't know what it is.

The point here is: nice tools help but do not solve our problems and the same time that short iterations, real scope review, communication, real information that serves as input for the work, test cases and other stuffs that makes the big wheel turn helps much more.

In a more philosophical way of thinking: a beautiful ring (the tool) is still just a ring without a gentle hand (the process) to have it, and I can imagine much more uses for a gentle hand than to a ring.