Jazz Technical Lead Erich Gamma Answers Your Questions 54
Could you explain, minus the marketing speak that seems to pervade the IBM site, what is Jazz, what makes it a community-oriented developer's site, why is it different from, say, sourceforge.net, and if Jazz is so community-oriented and yet apparently tied in to Rational, where are the community versions (not trials, not demos, not limited to the point of uselessness functionality) of Rational products?
Jazz is not a product but it is the name of a project that has the goal of building a new set of team products and to better integrate existing products.
The Jazz project was kicked-off in 2005. At that time we observed that the tooling situation for an individual developer using an IDE like Eclipse was pretty good. However, when it came to working as a team, our own experience and feedback from our customers indicated there are still many pain points. Our own experience comes from working for many years on Eclipse. We developed in a globally distributed team, spread across many time zones, and using many agile practices. The goal of the Jazz project was to take a fresh look at how teams work together and to build a new generation of products from the ground up that makes development more collaborative, but also more fun. We put the team at the center of all our designs. Initially we focused on development related pain points like support for iterative planning, painless build submissions, collaborating and fixing broken builds, simplifying parallel development, easy progress tracking, and finally improving transparency. Collaboration becomes more effective with increased transparency. One of the goals here is to make it easy for everybody to know what is going on in the project without having to ask. Since then we expanded the scope to cover the role of testers and business analysts. The set of new products that were built from the ground up include:
- Rational Team Concert (RTC): Provides a new customizable work item/defect tracking system, a continuous build system, a new source control system, and customizable agile planning that supports project management practices like the ones from Scrum, and dashboards and reports. Version 2.0 has actually shipped just a week ago.
- Rational Quality Manager (RQM): Provides test management, test planning, and includes a test lab management component.
- Rational Requirements Composer (RRC): Provides requirements definition for business analysts, client stakeholders and software developers using a variety of capture techniques.
These products share a common infrastructure using the building blocks we
refer to as the Jazz Foundation. The Foundation provides a common set of
services that can be leveraged by a Jazz tool. To enable integration with
existing tools, the Jazz Foundation supports the Open Services for
Lifecycle Collaboration initiative; an independent project to define a set
of REST based protocols for sharing information across disparate tools. Actually, we are not only contributing to the
specification, we have actually used the OSLC specifications for
integrating the above tools.
Finally, we have grown a community around the Jazz project on www.jazz.net.
Transparency and feedback are very important to us, not only for the tools
we provide, but also for how we develop the products ourselves. To get that
direct feedback, we do our development on jazz.net out in the open. On
jazz.net you can interact with the development team, learn about our
development plans, see our RTC powered dashboards, submit defects and
enhancements, or download intermediate milestone builds.
If you want to read about how all these capabilities come together, there
is a new eBook available for download. The eBook describes, using scenarios, how
business analysts, development teams, and testers collaborate using the
above mentioned products.
If you are interested in how we develop our products using Rational Team
Concert in a globally distributed team, I did a web cast that sheds light
on our development practices.
Rather than reading feature comparisons, I suggest that you jump in and
give Rational Team Concert 2.0 a try. We made it very easy to kick the Team
Concert tires. In less than 30 minutes you will have a running server, a
client, and a sample project for a small team working on a fictitious JUnit
release. There is also a community edition called Express-C (free for up to
3 users). Based on community feedback, we have made more features
available in the Express-C edition. You can find the descriptions of the
editions on the Jazz site. For those of you that do prefer to compare features, there is also a feature overview of RTC . If you have questions, feel free to post them to the user forum on jazz.net. Our development team is always there to answer questions.
Rational? -- by an anonymous reader
I work in a small shop that makes some use of Websphere Application Server
and the Rational development tools. I basically find the entire structure
of the IBM software offerings relating to the above technologies
incomprehensible. Products are constantly being renamed, discontinued,
bundled, unbundled and rebranded. Names are long, generic, and practically
interchangeable, and so are the feature lists. How do you plan to run a
community support site based around this hodge-podge? I would assume the
volatile nature of IBM's software marketing makes your task something
approaching impossible. How do you expect to build a strong developer
community based around products that are in a constant flux? I don't see
any way around ending up with a large number of granular, isolated
communities that spring up around specific products and thrive for a year
or two. In short, how do you plan to unify a developer community without
IBM first unifying the software development platform that this community is
to be built around?
Obviously the Rational portfolio has grown through acquisitions (Build
Forge, Watchfire and Telelogic being the most recent), and the process of
bringing these acquired products into a logical product family while
minimizing disruption for existing users is an ongoing effort. One goal of
the Jazz project is to improve the integration of existing products by
providing the Jazz integration architecture and by contributing to the OSLC
initiative as mentioned above.
The Jazz community site is the live development infrastructure for the Jazz
project and the new Jazz products. We launched www.jazz.net in 2006
together with the availability of the first Rational Team Concert beta
version. As you can see from the URL it is "ibm" neutral and focuses on
Jazz products. Since then the community has rapidly grown and there are now
over 17000 participants in Jazz forums. Customers really appreciate the
direct communication channel with the development team. Given the positive
feedback we have recently on-boarded two additional Jazz products on
jazz.net: Rational Requirements Composer and Rational Quality Manager. This
was combined with a reorganization of the site itself to optimize for the
new projects, improve user experience, and create a high quality technical
library of materials created by the development teams themselves to help
educate and get teams set up and running and become productive very
quickly. Additional Jazz products will on-board on jazz.net as they
emerge. Some of the Jazz products will also be in flux, the point is that
we make them available early, are transparent about their development and
invite users to provide feedback.
RTC vs CQ and CC -- by SunSunich (1588709)
First of all let me congratulate you on the successful launch of version
2.0 of RTC and 1.0 JF. It is really great work, thank you and all the Jazz
Team. The functionality of Rational Team Concert greatly overlaps with the
ClearQuest and ClearCase. Why is it necessary to create a new product? Why
not just release it as new versions of old? For customers, it could be
easier to adapt. What is the future of CQ|CC, how you see it? Thank you.
With the Jazz project we are trying to do something new and do it in the
open - but clearly we understand that we can't just leave the existing
customers behind. As mentioned in the question about the Jazz project
above, we have experienced several pain points with the existing tools. A
common point of friction was the lack of integration which resulted in a
lack of transparency. One lesson from Eclipse was that to achieve
integration you need some common foundation or integration platform.
Retrofitting a new integration platform wasn't a viable approach and in
addition there were additional pressures to better support agile practices.
While the Jazz project did start from the ground-up, we reused many ideas
from CC and CQ. For example, the stream model from CC or the customization
support from CQ. Once we went down this path it was obvious that we needed
an integration solution for CC and CQ.
In RTC 1.0 we provided "synchronizer" connectors which can synchronize data
between the Jazz and the CC or CQ repositories. With this functionality, an
agile team can start to use RTC while periodically synchronizing their code
with the "mothership" CC repository. For RTC 2.0 we have expanded the
integration options with the support "bridge" connectors. A bridge doesn't
synchronize the data but rather links artifacts across repositories. The CC
Bridge allows linking a ClearCase UCM activity with an RTC work item. This
allows CC users to continue using CC, but also benefit from the additional
capabilities RTC offers such as agile planning support, work items,
reports, dashboards, notifications etc. The CQ Bridge provides linking CQ
Records and RTC work items. Finally, both RTC and CQ implement the Open Services for Life Cycle Collaboration
specification for change management systems. This enables a third tool like
the Rational Quality Manager to work with either RTC or CQ when it comes to
filing defects for failed tests, for example.
To conclude, there is still a significant investment in enhancing ClearCase
and ClearQuest and this will continue. RTC 2.0 provides good options for
users who want to use RTC, CQ and CC together. All these options have been
enriched further in 2.0 to enable gradual adoption.
Could Jazz Benefit from a Distributed Model? -- by A.K.A_Magnet (860822)
Do you think Jazz could gain from a distributed model, like git does for
source control management, where the repositories can be forked and kept
synchronized upstream/downstream (a bit like a "progressive fork" where
fixes can be shared but the project can be forked for various reasons)? I
heard there is a git connector in incubation but it seems to me more than
just code artifacts should be distributed. After enjoying the many benefits
of distributed SCMs, it's hard to go back, and I think at least issue
management could gain from the same model.
Using the terminology from above the Git integration will be a bridge
connector. It will be available as an incubator on jazz.net soon and it
leverages the OSLC change management specification supported by RTC to
create the linkage to RTC work items. Flowing changes across repositories
is appealing and this feature is in our backlog. Some explorations to
support a distributed Jazz SCM were already undertaken. Details on the
current status and open issues are available on the developer wiki on jazz.net.
Cleaning Up Collaboration -- by eldavojohn (898314)
Jazz seems to rely heavily on developer community and their
collaboration--and the influence for Jazz is said to be the World Wide Web.
"The Jazz portfolio consists of a common platform and a set of tools that
enable all of the members of the extended development team to collaborate
more easily." The biggest problem I have with collaboration tools is the
metadata. No one does it right. Someone writes a blog or uploads a document
but doesn't tag it. Enterprise search is broken. Management hands us wikis
yet no one has the time or patience to maintain them. The protective
blanket of "it's agile, baby" shields us from any beat downs. And with
every new tool I realize that it's not the tool that improves
collaboration, it's the team. Look at Slashdot's tagging system. Does it
help me that one hundred stories are tagged with "no"? Collaboration seems
to spontaneously work but is often out of your control when it does and
doesn't. How does Jazz fix these problems? How does Jazz improve
collaboration when it seems to me that tools are such a small part of
collaboration? Will a small development team be able to use such a large
set of tools?
I agree that no tool can fix collaboration problems and the team plays the
main part in the game. In the Jazz project, we are focusing on
collaboration in the context of software artifacts like builds, change
sets, test plans, defects, or baselines. Software artifacts are semantic
rich, structured, and there are typically rules, permissions or approvals
involved when it comes to changing artifacts. Jazz products can improve the
collaboration around software artifacts by making these rules explicit. Our
goal was that the tool not only acts as the police but also as a guide that
helps team members conform to the rules. Let's use Rational Team Concert as
an example. When a change set requires a review before it is shared with
the team, the tool will not just flag you when the review is missing, it
also offers to initiate the review process for you. This involves
suspending the changes from the current work space, attaching them to a
work item, and notifying the reviewer that there is a pending review.
Behind all this is a process component in the Jazz Foundation that allows
you to configure these rules in a flexible way. The flexibility is required
since otherwise tools can get easily in the way. A team operates
differently during an early exploration of a product and one week before it
ships. The rules can be specific to a particular role, or a particular
team, and the development phase of the project. Here is an analog example
to tagging a blog: checking in a change set and wanting to track the reason
for the change. To guide users, you can define a precondition for the
check-in operation that will ensure that the change set is linked to a work
item tracking the reason for the change. When a user attempts to check-in a
change set without an associated work item, the user is shown a list of
work items that they own to choose from. If none of them apply, the user
can easily create a new work item on the fly to complete the check-in. As a
side effect the change set and the work item are now linked together. As
you work with Rational Team Concert it establishes many such links between
artifacts for you in the context of your work. For example, the work items
that are fixed and included in a build are linked to the build result
artifact. These links increase the transparency and allow everybody in the
team to understand why something was changed, which will helps
collaboration.
In addition to making team roles and rules more explicit, the tools improve
collaboration by helping team members stay on top of changes that affect
the whole team. The team's current sprint or iteration plan and the
current progress are easily accessible for everybody to see. Team members
are notified about events in their team and they can track event feeds
using RSS readers and aggregators. Similarly, broken builds are linked to a
work item where the discussion about the broken build takes place and this
work item is then easily visible and accessible from the team's dashboard.
These are just a few examples that illustrate how a tool can facilitate the
collaboration in the context of software artifacts.
Now regarding the question on small development teams, RTC is designed to
scale up from single teams working in a single release to multiple (even
distributed) teams working on multiple releases and you can easily use RTC
for small teams. In fact, the Express-C edition is free for teams up to
three. Even a small team needs to do the backlog and sprint planning, needs
continuous builds, needs to track progress, manages defects and wants to
make the current state of the project visible on dashboards.
The Directions of the Eclipse Foundation -- by eldavojohn (898314)
Eclipse has been going on since the early 2000s and six days ago enjoyed
the release of Galileo (v3.5). If you've had time to look at recent
release, what are your opinions on what Eclipse has become? Has it made any
wrong turns? How do you respond to criticisms of "bloat" or "too resource
intensive"? Do you see it becoming more than what it is or transforming?
The Galileo release is quite an achievement. Over 30 projects with over 380
committers from over 40 organizations have contributed to this joint
release. Obviously you do not want to consume Galileo all at once but
rather pick one of the available packages that suit your needs. Now that my
team's focus is on Jazz and Rational Team Concert, we have become consumers
of many Eclipse projects. Having a release train with aligned project
releases is a big help for us and is the right direction.
As consumers we also appreciate the API stability that Eclipse platform
provides. Regarding bloat, the API stability is not free. It means that
once something has surfaced as an API, you cannot remove or change it
anymore. For example, if you look under the covers in the Eclipse source
code, you find three different preference store mechanisms. This is the
price you pay for API stability. Actually, Eclipse now includes some nice
tools to track API changes and more.
The "too resource intensive" criticism depends on which packages/plug-ins
you are using. Eclipse is an extensible system and is therefore vulnerable
to contributions that can be too resource hungry. To keep a software system
interesting to users, you need a constant flow of new features. The
challenge is to preserve the performance and resource characteristics as
new features are added. The Eclipse SDK team does measurements to track
this. There is a set of performance JUnit tests that are run for each
build. Once a test runs slower than the baseline from the previous release,
the test turns red. The results are published for each build. Here is an
example report from Eclipse 3.5. Based on our own use of Eclipse for developing RTC, I do not experience that Eclipse has become slower over time or more resource intensive.
Looking back, I don't necessarily see wrong turns, but rather some turns we
probably could have taken but didn't. For example, the Eclipse platform is
language agnostic and the Java Development tools built on top of the
platform. There is a language toolkit layer (LTK) in between the platform
that provides some generic infrastructure for implementing refactorings.
However, this layer is thinner than implementers of new languages on
Eclipse would like. They therefore have to resort to copy code from JDT.
This is obviously not ideal. Even though we were aware of this issue, we
didn't have the cycles to pursue a more generic language layer. Having said
that, I must say that the Eclipse C Development tool is cool in Galileo and
there is good support for many other languages. There also is the Dynamic
Languages Toolkit incubator project at Eclipse.org.,
Will SWT and Swing ever merge in Eclipse? -- Fuzuli (135489)
I have to build quite complex tools using GEF and GMF, and there are many
cases where I'd like to have the power of Java2D, and reuse some of the
great frameworks out there built on Swing.
More and more people are using AWT/SWT bridge, since SWT does not provide
an underlying drawing framework as rich as Java2D.
Eclipse has great things like EMF, and the platform is number one choice
for tooling, but when it comes to things like Bezier curves etc, Swing is
much easier to use. So are we going to see more developer friendly versions
of Eclipse where Swing is more available to us?
SWT has continually improved its advanced graphics API for drawing Bezier
curves, alpha blending, gradients etc. You can see it in action in the
GraphicsExample (http://www.eclipse.org/swt/examples.php.) and there are
several example snippets. If the
current support is not sufficient, then you should file enhancement
requests against the SWT component at eclipse.org.
As you mention SWT provides the support to enable the SWT/Swing integration
and enables embedding an AWT hierarchy in a SWT widget hierarchy. The SWT
team has currently no plans go beyond this. However, there is also the
Albireo project at Eclipse.org. This is a technology project in incubation with the goal of simplifying the task of
combining user interface components from the Swing and SWT toolkits.
A follow-up question -- by an anonymous reader
will SWT and the whole Eclipse workbench ever run
in a Web browser? We have built a product based on SWT/Eclipse but our
customers complain they cannot run it from a browser and instead have to
download 200MB+ worth of plugins before they even start evaluating our
product.
The eclipse e4 project has been investigating this very question. At
EclipseCon 2009, the team provided an update and showed some interesting
demos. You can find more details about the e4 project and a presentation covering the eclipse/desktop exploration online.
The short answer is that there is no free lunch for existing applications
which generally must be re-factored to take into account that the
application is now split between client and server. For your application to
run in a web browser, the libraries it uses must also run in a web browser.
In particular, one needs web equivalents of the workbench facilities that
Eclipse RCP apps are based on. The approach currently being investigated is
to provide "e4 workbench services". The e4 project is increasing support
for running JavaScript on the desktop. As a consequence when the
application is written against these workbench services, the same JS code
can run unchanged in both the desktop and the web. In combination, this
provides a path to achieving a good user experience in both the desktop and
the web with some reuse.
A different approach being investigated in parallel is the eclipse Rich
Ajax Project, which is also part of the Galileo release. RAP runs your SWT widgets
remotely in a web browser, which have some other trade-offs as the approach
used by e4.
On strong typing, and design patterns and testing -- by bADlOGIN (133391)
A number of weak typing language zealots like to point out that Design
patterns is simply a way to make strongly typed languages "suck less".
This can be a compelling argument in terms of simplicity and syntax in
examples when you take a look at books like "Design Patterns in Ruby"
compared with "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented
Software". There's also an argument that strong typing is a form of tight
coupling and antithetical to half of the Object Oriented axiom, "loose
coupling, strong cohesion". Given the momentum in popularity that unit
testing across multiple languages and development methodologies has
(rightfully!) enjoyed, is it time to encourage language designers and
programmers to move away from strong typing usage and substitute better
testing practices?
The Design Patterns book is now over fifteen years old and it predates the
Internet, Java, and XML, which is pretty amazing to me. However, it doesn't
predate Smalltalk. Smalltalk is an influential and powerful dynamic
object-oriented language. When working on the pattern catalog, we looked
for known uses of our patterns in the Smalltalk libraries. If you study
some of the pattern examples you can see how they can be implemented in
Smalltalk. What is definitely true is that dynamic languages provide some
interesting pattern implementation variations. I do not go as far as to say
that static typing is in strong contrast to object-oriented principles. You
can define loosely coupled systems in statically typed languages using
interfaces and abstract classes. In addition, the more recent Dependency
Injection pattern allows you to configure the dependencies of an object
externally.
On the Current State of Academia? -- by eldavojohn (898314
I know a lot of people that are very vocal about what is right and wrong
with education today. Especially college institutions: "No one teaches C,
everyone teaches four years of Java, no one understands the theory, a CS
grad doesn't even know what a model-view-controller pattern is." The list
goes on. Since you have your doctorate and have probably spent a lot of
time in research and academia, what's wrong with most computer science or
engineering programs in general today? What would you like to see more or
less of? Are there any subject directions recently taken (EJB, garbage
collectors, interpreted languages) you'd like to comment on? You seem to
be non-opposed to Java which, I'll admit, is rare to me for someone with a
doctorate. I would like to hear your views since so often all I hear about
Java is that it is slow and only good for people that want cheap software
developed quick by beginner developers.
I cannot complain about the students that come out of nearby universities
and that interview for positions on our team. Many of these students used
Eiffel as their first language but they are all familiar with different
languages using different paradigms. While they are not experts in EJBs,
JFS, Dojo, Ruby on Rails or whatever, they have a solid CS background with
lectures on patterns and are eager to learn. They come up to speed quickly
with new technologies. This is required when joining a team like ours
working on Rational Team Concert. For example getting started on the
Rational Team Concert project requires a new team member to learn a mix of
things such as Java, JavaScript, Dojo, CSS, C# (when working on the Visual
Studio Client), Eclipse Plug-ins, REST and finally our agile development
practices. One possible area of improvement is more familiarity with larger
software systems and their architectures. Open Source project like Eclipse
can serve as great study material. On the positive side I also observe that
more students are starting to contribute to open source projects and can
point to submitted patches in their CVs.
Yet another one (Score:3, Funny)
Yet another white man making money off the black man's music.
Oh, IBM Jazz. Never mind.
This is actually pretty annoying (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Um, I take that back. The two video results are for some ungodly ballroom dance thing.
the first question (Score:5, Interesting)
The first question, was the best question, and the rest is pretty fluffy.
"Free for up to three users" means "useless for all intents and purposes, unless you pay up."
It's a neat space, and it's neat to see people interested in it, and i'm sure someone will learn some valuable lessons from jazz.
It'll probably only get used exclusively by IBM though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Ladies and gentlemen, Erich Gamma (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:2)
What the hell is a Jazz? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where should I have heard about this?
What is it? Is this a consumer technology or server-room toy or a device or platform or what?
And most importantly: When will my manager start requiring 5 years experience in it despite never using it in projects?
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand: Who cares?
The harder someone tries to push something into me, the more I fight it. (Reminds you of something? Well, that's for a reason. ^^)
Seriously. Let's try if we can get trough with a technology that does not exist, when we just make the summary tl;dr for ScuttleMonkey.
Anyone got any suggestion?
Incorrect history. (Score:3, Informative)
Not that it really matters, but the Design Patterns book just under 15 years old (published October of 1994), and it certainly doesn't predate the Internet (which is, if one dates from the adoption of the term as a term for the specific network of interlinked TCP/IP based networks that it still refers to, close to 25 years old) or even the World Wide Web(which is either a few months short of 19 years old, having first been implemented in late 1990, or 16 years old, dating either from the CERN announcement that the WWW would be free for everyone with no licensing fees or the introduction of NCSA Mosaic, both in 1993).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that it really matters, but the Design Patterns book just under 15 years old (published October of 1994),
It depends what you consider the relevant date... from our perspective, publication date is the most critical thing. From the perspective of an author, and from the perspective of somebody trying to place it in history alongside things that might have influenced it, the date of the last word being written is probably more relevant, which given the glacial pace of publishing was probably 6 months or
IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
I finally figured out the problem I was having in a discussion with another person involved in this project in the question post. He continually used heavy amounts of abstract language, and almost never used concrete language. Attempts to get concrete answers kept getting abstract ones instead, and I could never figure out what Jazz was. It is hard to explain anything with purely abstract language. It is too late now, but here's some advice for any future slashdot interviewees that may happen to read this.
S
Re: (Score:2)
There is no way to quickly evaluate any of the technologies to see if it would be an improvement over what we are currently using.
Not true at all... you can download the client/server trial and take it for a spin.
My team just migrated from CVS + Eclipse to Jazz (RTC 1.0) and I can tell you it's like moving forward a decade in sophistication, capability, flexibility and agility. (It also doesn't hurt that they've basically implemented the system I described in my honors thesis a decade ago!)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:IBM (Score:5, Funny)
To Clarify, I'm talking about IBM's failure to explain their products in a clear manner, rather than the ( at this point unkown) merits of their products.
Take this from their pdf entitled "Changes in Jazz 2.0"
First page contains the following bullet points:
* Deliver Global Enterprise Readiness
* Enhanced agile planning via web
* Support Collaborative ALM
* Support growth of a vibrant Ecosystem
* Bridges to your existing environments
* Other Enhancements
Seriously "Deliver Global Enterprise Readiness"?? Where do I sign up?! I need me some of that. Growth of a *vibrant* ecosystem? That's my problem, my software only supports the growth of feculent ecosystems! What a fool I've been!
Re: (Score:1)
Agreed. Design Patterns was a classic, but he lost me at the second question by using "on-board" as a verb (and more than once); a sure sign of marketing-speak having overwhelmed the technical side of his brain. It felt sort of like the end of Brazil: "He's got away from us, Jack." "I'm afraid you're right, Mr. Helpmann. He's gone."
The Best Comment (Score:1, Flamebait)
Brilliant:
Products are constantly being renamed, discontinued, bundled, unbundled and rebranded. Names are long, generic, and practically interchangeable
That summarizes a lot of the problems the Free Software community has, actually. GNOME and KDE are particularly bad offenders. What's a Phonon? Dolphin? What? Totem? Huh?
And we wonder why most people don't take Free Software seriously. People don't even know what's there because the names are so obscure. Codenames are worse than useless in a Free Software setting. They actually tend to become the actual name of the project and that just leads to confusion. It's silly all around.
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, the OSS names are stupid and ugly, but you just run the thing, and understand its purpose.
Now, go to the IBM web site and try to understand the "Rational" products... at least try to discover the very reason of their existence. It you're brave enough, you will download 80 Mb of an "intelligent installer" which in turn will download 2Gb of the real software. Often there will be no instructions about how to execute it, but you'll be referred to some broken IBM hiperlink for up to date instructions...
Re: (Score:2)
Broken license model kills it (Score:5, Insightful)
Three free user license are a joke. The free edition is useless except for student projects. It's just a marketing gag.
No edition includes free contributor licences needed for people reporting bugs. Say you have 1000 end users, you should buy contributer licences at $630 each. This make RTC useless for product companies.
Floating licenses are another pain point. They are not available for the free or the medium edition. They are only available in the $35k Standard edition.
Usually you get a discount if you buy more licenses. Not at IBM. If you seem to like the product and want more licenses, IBM inflicts massive financial pain on you. First, you can't use the free server for more than 10 developers. It is known to scale nicely beyond 70 users but it is artificially limited to max 10 users. Has IBM ever heard of volume discounts? Hello??? Sure, if you are Fortune 500 company you get 60-70% discounts but if you are not, you won't even get a sales guy talking to you, possibly giving you 5% when you kiss his feet.
If you want say >50 users, you need the 35k server. As if that would not be enough, the price of a developer license jumps from $1260 to $4k on the 35k server. If you go so far, IBM is so nice to offer you floating developer licenses at $7.1k each. A setup with 10 floating licenses is $115k. You still need contributor licenses for bug reporting at $630 or $2k floating.
Stop considering it. Look somewhere else. IBM does not want to sell it. Don't make a fool of yourself suggesting this to your boss.
IBM has a webcast explaining the license model in 10 minutes. 10 minutes!? Why can't the licence model be so simple that it can be explained in 30 seconds, e.g. like for the MS Team Foundation Server? Just take out all these pain points!
IBM also has a ROI calculator online. For my scenario I only got negative ROI. I truly respect that IBM has the guts to list the prices publicly on their website. No need to call an "IBM representative" and getting dragged into professional sales talk. At http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/rtc/standard/ [ibm.com] they list their brain-dead model. Other companies would be ashamed. The arrogance that IBM shows there makes many people hate IBM right away even if they like Jazz and Team Concert.
At that IBM page you can put all those licenses mentioned above in your shopping cart, say the $35k server, 100 developers, 100 contributors, and then pay with your credit card. Or print it for your boss. You get into the range of millions quicly. In a shopping cart! It's pretty funny. IBM has really lost any sense for reality.
Open-source anything? Nothing. You can get the OSLC specifications for free. That's all.
The Rational Requirements Composer is a nice tool as well and has a license model that is broken in a similar way as that of RTC. The licensing starts with three users for $33k. Not even a free edition.
About Erich, I think he is a nice guy and he did a great job. He's the #1 guy suffering from the Incredible Bullshit Machine around him.
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IBM has a webcast explaining the license model in 10 minutes. 10 minutes!? Why can't the licence model be so simple that it can be explained in 30 seconds, e.g. like for the MS Team Foundation Server? Just take out all these pain points!
In my experience the IBM licensing model is complex so that more people need to pay for support.
Stop considering it. Look somewhere else. IBM does not want to sell it. Don't make a fool of yourself suggesting this to your boss.
Oh they will sell it. Propose it to your company and wait for the kickbacks.
He's the #1 guy suffering from the Incredible Bullshit Machine around him.
I thought it stood for In Business for Money.
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This reminds me of my main gripe against ClearCase/ClearQuest when my last project team switched to it from CVS/Bugzilla. It seemed like the #1 requirement for the product suite was to extract maximal license revenue. (and it also had more admin overhead, and was less usable from the web, and was yet another toolset that works in Windows and Linux but doesn't give a flying F*%#$ about the Mac)
Based on some off-the-wall estimates, they also wound up not getting enough floating licenses for the thing initia
A Review (Score:1)
My team is currently using Jazz under an Academic license. Jazz is one of those systems that has potential. Right now it is to unstable, lacks 3rd party support and isn't very intuitive.
On the whole I would say that right now you're better off with Hudson + git/svn. That said if the developers focus more on usability and listen to their customers Jazz will be a major player in the future.
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On the whole I would say that right now you're better off with Hudson + git/svn.
Yes for SCM and build. But what would you use for a tracker and iteration planning tool?
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To my knowlege there are plugins for hudson that are decent trackers, though I haven't used any of them. Krymson is a project that will be hitting the market soon from Mya Software which I think will eventually be a strong force in the market.
As too planning I am involved with a distributed Story Card planning tool available for download at http://ase.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/ [ucalgary.ca] it, being an Academic OS project, is at times unstable though that is changing. You should also check out the Digital Table version which re
...constant flow of new features (Score:1)
To keep a software system interesting to users, you need a constant flow of new features.
No - that attitude is what is wrong with most software.
What users really want is for the basic functionality to work well, be stable and performant.
Only then should new features be considered, and considered carefully.
It's good to hear (Score:1)
A Comparison of RTC (Score:1)
Help! (Score:3, Funny)
What's the antidote for acronym poisoning?
Thought this was about music tech... (Score:1)