IBM Funds University Efforts To Expand Jazz Platform

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/20/08

IBM announced that it is awarding six research grants to universities to help the schools prepare students for the increasingly global nature of software development. The new research grants will help students research projects built on the IBM Jazz technology platform. The amounts weren't specified.

Jazz allows teams of developers in multiple countries spanning several time zones to collaborate. Some universities are using commercial products based on Jazz technology, such as IBM Rational Team Concert, in the classroom to provide students with the experience of working in large distributed teams. IBM Rational Team Concert is a collaborative environment designed to enhance real-time communication and collaboration among software delivery teams.

"The challenges faced by today's software developers are about team collaboration, productivity and working across borders and time zones," said Frank Maurer, head of the Agile Software Engineering group at the University of Calgary. "It's important for our students to understand the global dynamics of software development, and Jazz provides us with a platform for that."

Calgary received two grants. AP Jazz will link its synchronous AgilePlanner tool with the Jazz Team Server and integrate test-driven development with Agile project management, while Kode1061 examines providing a social networking platform for software development through a Jazz plug-in.

Brown University is exploring JAZZing for Help and Review to enable undergraduate teaching assistants to supervise and assist students remotely on their projects within Jazz, even though the teaching assistants aren't team members.

Carnegie Mellon is developing capabilities to support coordination among developers, based on communication and dependency data in the Jazz technology platform.

North Carolina State is researching how to enhance the Jazz technology platform to include distributed pair programming between members of a team and help students to be part of a collaborative, distributed team within this environment.

Saarland University in Germany is examining the data gathered throughout Jazz's collaborative development process to improve code quality.