EclipseCon 2008 in a very spartan echoey room, but it's quite nicely lit, I like it. And would you like to introduce yourself? My name is Eric Gamma, I work for I Am Rational. Right now my focus is the jazz project and I'm the jazz lead. And we just survived our jazz live session last night. That's right, you guys had the big screen TVs hooked up and a bunch of demos and beer. It was the perfect session. What we did is we had our development team come sit around the table and we call it jazz live because people can come in, mingle, have a sip, but they don't have a dialogue, right? So we have in-depth conversations where answers could be given by demoing stuff, not just talking. And in the end they had to kick us out of the room at 10:30. I was kind of interested when I walked in there last night that there was a whole lot of... I tend to think of jazz as sort of one thing, but you guys had a whole bunch of different tables set up for demoing different aspects. So I mean, at this point, what are the sort of different parts of jazz, if you will? You have built the platform in a modular way. So what you will see now as the jazz platform models, you build products on top of that and we kind of package the technology of jazz platform into products. And what you will see, for instance, in the first product, which is called Rational Team Concert, which will ship in June. You will see kind of, in addition to the foundation, the platform infrastructure, which gives teams, process, know-how and base collaboration infrastructure, RSS feeds. You see kind of three main pillars, which is an SCM system, work-hacking, bug-tracking system, task-tracking system and the build system. Right. We pick these three components because they really help to show our vision, integrated tools, which put the tasks in the center and not the tools. Right. So you can do a task without falling off the cliff all the time from one tool to the other one. Right.
2:00You have to take notes on a sheet of paper. There's sort of some complete task lifecycle management, if you will, that can go through all of those different things. Yes. And the flows are really key, right? You get the flows and you can collaborate effectively, thanks that you have a seamless tool that knows about artifacts, can help with the links and you have the context. You guys are sometime soon near to having a release of stuff. So we've all been waiting. Well, we are shipping since a while, right? Right. It's an evolution, right? So we are shipping a beta since last June. And I guess when we talked last time, we were close to the beta too. Right. But there is one big change. And now since January, we open up the jazz.net website for everybody, so everybody can try it out. That's it. So since January, when you opened jazz.net up, what kind of, because you have the open commercial development process, right? Okay. And what kind of inputs and things have you been getting for people? How has that collaboration been working out with the general populace, if you will? So, yeah, we have seen the ramp up in registration as we hope and expected. And people are trying to know the number of questions increased. And also, one of my benchmarks is always know whether you have a community that is kind of on the past doing self-support, but the community can answer questions themselves. Right. And we have seen some of that, right? Someone asks, how do I do that? And someone out of the development team gives them the answer. Actually, that's how we do it. So I think we have seen this effect. It's a nice self-supporting community effect. That's definitely what we're seeing. And we see, of course, you know, enhancing requests. We see all the kind of interesting testing, you know, with our LDAP server. This thing doesn't work. So what is wrong? So we get some of the clips, right? For me, it's kind of like the clips. We had this nice contribution from the community. Not always code-based. But I know they test things out in different configurations. They give us feedback on, like how it's on-the-fly, competitive analysis, right? This product allows you to do that, how you do that. And we see the interaction coming on. So we have the forum. We have all the development wiki open. Our milestone builds are available. The blocks, of course. The plans. And our dashboards.
4:00That's a new component, which we didn't have in October, I guess. Oh, right. And is that for more of sort of a management or team level thing? No, it's a transparency thing, right? You can have your own dashboard. So I think as a developer, I also have my own dashboard. So I want to see the results of five queries without having to kind of run them. I see the results now with different lists. I see the RSS feeds. I see news, event feeds. And I also see now the window in the repository, reports, trending, things like that. That's right. I can see that at a glance. So it helps as a developer. But of course now when I'm a team leader, we have dashboards for individuals, for teams, and for the project. Right. So when you come to the team, know the team dashboards more for the team. They can see what our bug trends have, what's our burn down. Yeah. And at the level of the project. So what I do, since I'm kind of leading it, I use the dashboard and you'll see some comparison. For instance, like we have lots of bugs from testers. I want to see which component they are. So I can create a dashboard. Yeah. That's an interesting thing I've seen a lot recently, is people being okay with a bunch of numbers and statistics about development. Like, you know, I remember just, it wasn't that long ago where it was kind of, I don't know, there seemed to be a dim view of reporting on yourself. But I talk to lots of people now who are excited about it. Yeah. But what we try to do is we try to not report individuals. I think what's okay, what we care about is progress as a team together, right? Yeah. Because that's your succeed. So we don't really report how many bugs. I've even talked to people like Sixth Sense Analytics. I don't know if you've checked them out, but they have like a little agent that sort of monitors each individual. Watches. I think I saw that. And it seems a little creepy and big brother-y at first, but then again, if you're one of these sort of, I don't know, sort of continuous improvement sort of person, it's kind of interesting to think that you could actually monitor yourself. I mean, you don't want your boss like firing you because you've spent the whole day web surfing or something. No, exactly. And we don't do that, right? Right, right. Maybe if you burn down off the team, I don't know what's the progress in the middle.
6:00Do you have really burned down, have the work or not? And I think this is the whole theme of jazz. I mean, I mentioned integration as well, and transparency is the other big one. Yeah. Because transparency enables you to do, you know, reflect and act. Right? If you don't know what you want to be retrospective, you can look at, okay, what did you do? Oh yeah, we had this long bug, which took us really long to fix because, you know, the cross-team dependency didn't come in. I think transparency helps you to learn from that and also helps you with difficult problems globally through the development, cross-team dependencies, right? All these challenges we have there. So, I mean, this topic of remote working always comes up. And it came up in a conversation I was having on the Registered Open Season podcast with a guy from Dave Rosenberg from Mule Source and Matt Essay from El Fresco. And, you know, they're CEO-level people and they were curious about how, you know, balancing managing as a small company, as a startup, kind of remote working versus people leading in one office. And a lot of the work that you've been doing is based on kind of solving that problem. I guess the starting point is always, you know, a project starts small. Right. There's a small amount of people and also, you know, with jazz, you might want to have this growth path, right? You don't seem to have a system which is only good if you have a low distribution team, whatever, right? Teams of teams. But we also have to keep in mind, you start slow, you start in a small group and they will work on initial scenarios, kind of, and then break up the components. You have to scroll with them, right? And I think that's what you want to support, that you can grow up. And I think what's really important to get something started, you need face to face. Yeah. Like the stick is on the wall, all this, this collaboration exercise you can do, you know, what's the same learning, whatever. I think it needs to be face to face. Right. Once you have initial vision and understand, okay, that's a potential set of components we can do. And then, okay, yeah, this site might want to work on that. I think then you can start to split. Right. Right. You need to establish that shared goal. The shared goal, right?
8:00And also, kind of, people who will then move to the site have to put on, they have to carry on, they have to meet the carrier, right? Right. The vision to the different sites. They've got to carry the virus of success or whatever, right? They need to infect it, exactly, yeah. Right. And then they talk to their teams, right? And then how, that's how it starts. And what's important is that right from the beginning you have good collaboration infrastructure, right? That you have builds and you can, as soon as possible, start iterating, right? As soon as you start iterating, you're breathing. Yeah. Okay, so that's kind of the pattern we have. I think there's no panacea when it comes to this build development. I think it's really important if you have this build site, you have good carrier of the information. I mean, you have to have a network where information flows well from the center to the leaves, right? Yeah. And, of course, you make mistakes on that. So, some collaboration events we do now. We have, you know, all the hub, the component leads that work on different sites. And we have bi-weekly calls per week. Bi-weekly per week. So, we have two calls per week. And what we learned over there, we talk about issues, what's blocking us. Uh-huh. So, it's a little stand-up, right? But a stand-up meeting on the phone, which is not every day. And what we learned, for instance, was not good because what we talked about, that didn't flow out to the team. Yeah, it sort of stops at that person. So, that's why I know that, of course, you do meeting notes, you have a scribe, and then, of course, there's part, that's nice in jazz, right? You have the plans, and you just attach the meeting notes to the plans, which keeps them up-to-date, right? The meeting notes are combined with the iteration plans. Yeah. You know where to go, and they will time out if they get dated, but that's... Well, great. Well, that was all pretty exciting stuff. So, I mean, since we talked about jazz, I mean, you mentioned there's jazz.net out there, but, I mean, what's the process for people getting a hold of it? The process is very simple, right? You go to www.jazz.net, register. We would like to know who you are, in case you send us love letters, right? You know where you're coming from. I mean, love letters of pocket reports. And you download, it's very easy to install.
10:01We've made it quite easy to install. There are sample projects. So, one of my goals now, we should be able to just install server and client with the end. In less than 10 minutes. Right. Sample projects. You can be up and running and start to communicate with the developer team and the user to ask questions. There is one interesting question. So, I mean, if you're going to have the rational products out there. And if I went down and downloaded jazz and I started using it, how does that go on? Okay. That's where, of course, since we, as developers know, we have kind of... The brand vision is jazz. Now, of course, some products have different names. Right, right. That's why I'm, of course, I know I'm sloppy, not all is clear. Sure. But what you download now is actually the first version of the product that builds on jazz, which is rational. Okay. And you would be downloading a beta. So, if you wanted the full release version... Exactly. Does the beta expire or something? Or... That's the whole thing we are, I guess. The more we know about what the product conditions are. Okay. But I don't have them... So, at the moment, I mean, just to be clear, there's not like a guarantee that you could use this beta forever or something. Forever. Do you have to actually upgrade this? Well, I don't mean... That really depends on how... Yeah. The license, no... What we said, it's... What's clear is it's free for open source projects. Right. Okay. Qualified open source that we have to show some criteria. And for academic use. Okay. It's free. So, if you're in those two camps, you can pretty much just use it perpetually at the moment. And we have already a university that use it and give us interesting feedback. Right. And, yeah, right now it's kind of the milestone M5A there. It shows that we even make milestones able to do public. Right. Because I thought, well, between the last bit and the last milestone, there was just enough good stuff that we want to share with the community. Well, that sounds great. Well, thanks for taking all this time to give us the sort of quarterly jazz update. Oh, yeah. Okay. I hope I can dump too much. No, no. It was great. Okay. Enjoy the rest of the clips. My best. Thanks.