Open Source Blog

Requirements Composer will sit atop IBM’s Telelogic Doors and Rational Requisite Pro requirements management tools, adding the power of the Jazz collaborative environment and its ability to link with other tools from IBM and rivals using Jazz’s open source APIs.

Pic: Aturkus on Flickr, CC licence.

The Requirements Composer will be aimed mostly at business analysts rather than coders, and replace some of the functions that those analysts might otherwise have chosen the likes of Microsoft Visio or PowerPoint for: sharing relatively basic business process diagrams with one another and across teams. “This will enable business analysts to bring activity type diagrams into the Jazz environment,” said Grout.

While Jazz’s APIs are open source, Jazz is not an open source platform, Grout explained. Users can download the platform and three client licenses at no cost, but if they choose to scale up the development team, IBM will charge them a license fee.

IBM calls the model 'open commercial', since although it's not open source, customers and partners can follow its development and add feature requests to the list and so on at www.jazz.net.

While Grout would not put figures on how popular the Jazz collaborative software development platform has been to date, he said companies are already using it to build production software, including a major UK high-street bank.

Grout said that another proof-point is that IBM’s 90-odd Jazz developers are using Jazz themselves in its development. “We’re drinking our own champagne,” he said.

While Jazz currently supports only the Windows and Linux operating systems, Grout said that IBM is looking at expanding its platform coverage in its next product release. IBM just recently released a beta of Rational Team Concert for IBM System z and i Series.

Grout acknowledged that Jazz enables developers to choose the tools they prefer even if they are not from IBM, and acknowledged that as well as rival proprietary development tools, developers may use Jazz to collaborate between users of open source tools like Subversion.

Grout described Jazz as the enterprise service bus (ESB) of software delivery tools, or as the Eclipse of back-end development tools.

Find out more at jazz.net.