IBM's Rational Software Division recently held its 2008 Software Development Conference in Orlando, Florida. Key announcements included a new collaboration platform (Rational Team Concert), a new collaborative requirements definition tool (Rational Requirements Composer), a new quality management tool (Rational Quality Manager), and integration of the Jazz collaborative software delivery platform into numerous existing Rational products.

Contextual Collaboration Meets Application Lifecycle Management

The Jazz platform originated as a research project within IBM to extend integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Eclipse, and other clients using the platform with formal collaboration capabilities. This project aimed to prevent development teams from having to rely on ad hoc collaboration processes and tools which were not contextually integrated into development processes and tools. Jazz is a community-driven, open platform upon which vendors can build applications that are being delivered through IBM Rational products. IBM Rational is one vendor that is releasing applications for the Jazz platform and adding Jazz integration to existing products.