IBM Funds University Collaboration Studies

• By Kurt Mackie
• 10/25/07

IBM has provided grant funding to three universities that are using the company's Jazz collaboration solutions for software development. The universities--including the University of California at Irvine, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria--received Jazz Faculty Grants from IBM.

Jazz is an open solution, but not open source, meaning that developers can see the code to fix bugs but not alter and distribute code. IBM is building the Jazz collaboration solution into its some of its Rational governance and lifecycle management products.

The University of California at Irvine is using Jazz for development projects using multiple monitors on the developer's desktop. Researchers are examining ways of designing software tools to utilize the extra display space.

The University of British Columbia is using an Emergent Expertise Locator tool as an extension to the Jazz platform. The tool can help recommend team members for a software development project based on who changed files in past collaborative efforts. In addition, the university is using IBM Rational Team Concert to establish a real-world collaborative development environment in the classroom.

The University of Victoria is working with the Related Contributors Recommender and Feature Awareness Team Explorer functions in Jazz to keep track of expertise in a distributed-team development process.

The three universities are preparing presentations on their Jazz research to be delivered at the OOPSLA conference in Montreal on Oct. 24, 2007.