Kimberley Peter, IBM Toronto Lab
Making Jazz: Collaboration, Community and Design in Open Commercial Software Development

Abstract: In the early 2000s, an increased focus started to take shape around the notion of collaborative development tools. This focus marked a move away from strictly supporting the solo developer at her work in an integrated development environment to one that supported globally distributed development teams. The vision of Jazz technology as a team collaboration platform came about in response to the need to support and connect distributed people and teams - their activities, their artifacts, and their varied time zones - in an orchestrated way

In realizing this vision, the Jazz team undertook an approach called open commercial software development - one that exposed the intentions and artifacts of the development cycle to anyone who wanted to watch and to participate. For Jazz, this open approach has meant that a community was fostered early and continues to grow through Jazz.net. For the community, the transparency has meant early insight and an opportunity to be part of a continuous feedback loop that influences design and development decisions.

The community has been one of the most influential aspects of designing for Jazz and its first offspring, Rational Team Concert. By self-hosting along with the development team, and doing so in the open on Jazz.net, the design team simultaneously participates in the community and observes it. That community includes developers on the Jazz and Rational Team Concert projects; developers on other projects that use our tools to build their own products; the many allied disciplines involved in software development, including our design team; and most notably, our early customers and business partners.

This talk will provide background on the motivation for the Jazz project, highlight the influence of self-hosting, community, and the input mechanisms t hat have helped shape the current design.

About the Speaker: Kimberley Peter is a user interface designer with the Media Design Studio at the IBM Toronto Lab. She works on Eclipse- and Web-based applications for the IBM Rational Software brand. Her most recent design activities have been for the Jazz Project, where for the past number of years she has enjoyed collaborating with her fellow design, usability, and development colleagues on the making of Jazz and the first Rational products to be based on it. She also leads the Rational Common Web UI effort, helping product teams that are Jazz-based and part of the Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management set of tools, iterate toward a common user experience. Kimberley contributes topics on user interface design to the Jazz Team Blog at jazz.net/blog/. She received a M.Sc. in Biomedical Communications from the University of Toronto in 1998.

At NPUC 2009, IBM Research - Almaden brought together innovators in academia and industry who are leading the way to a more natural, accessible, and social design and software development process . They explored how to help improve the productivity of current programmers and make creating software more accessible to a larger and more diverse population than ever before.