While integrated development environments (IDEs) have made significant strides in improving the productivity of individual developers, there has yet to be a platform on which such IDEs truly support team based development. And yet the reality is that development team members are just as actively engaged in working with their teams as they are with writing their code, defining requirements, or tracking line item status.

The Jazz Platform recognizes that a development project ultimately succeeds when the development team members can easily collaborate and quickly share information about all aspects of their work through the development process.

A key challenge has been that the various forms of bookkeeping that are necessary to make a team successful, work that is critical to helping the team members work together effectively, is also very easy to forget, or to do incorrectly.

The Jazz Platform responds to such challenges by introducing and formalizing the notions of Teams, Collaboration in Context, and Work Items.

Teams (and Team Areas and Team Central)

The formalization of the Team is a key aspect of the Jazz Collaboration model. The Jazz Platform introduces Team Areas where a team and its team members are identified, along with their roles and permissions. Team Areas are also used to manage the team's project and process.

A team's artifacts are located in the Team Artifacts view and from here a user can access artifacts for which they have permission.

Team Central provides a single view in which a user can track various team events and activities. From this view, the user can check team news, build status, work item status, and other aspects of the development process which are ever changing.

Together, Team Areas, the Team Artifact View, and Team Central provide the team members with the artifacts and information they need to be an effective team. And with the notion of Team formalized, we can now consider the ways in which teams collaborate.

Collaboration in Context

Collaboration in Context is an essential theme of the Jazz Collaboration Model. Jazz components are enabled so as to allow an individual to easily identify who is doing what, and why, directly from within their current task context. Collaboration mechanisms such as instant messaging email, and subscriptions to changes, are built into Jazz components so that the user need not leave their development context to enter a separate collaboration context. The collaboration context is integrated within the development task's current context. This approach allows the user to remain fully engaged in their primary tasks.

The Jazz Platform approach to collaboration focuses on the development of information sharing mechanisms which support aspects such as:

Each of these aspects of collaboration is essential to a development team's success.

Work Items

Another critical aspect of the Jazz Collaboration Model is the automation of book keeping tasks, and the associated information. A discussed above, a key aspect of Collaboration in Content is allowing users to focus on their main tasks while integrating collaboration mechanisms within the existing task context. The same is true of the various bookkeeping task required to manage any development project.

To help automate the many bookkeeping tasks that surround the development process, the Jazz Platform introduces Work Items. A Work Item is a generalized (and extensible) notion of a development task.

This is an example of a Work Item

Typical work item types are defects, enhancements and tasks. But work items are also used:

Work Items identify development tasks, which team member is doing them, why they are doing them, any discussion, and attachments, anything that is relevant to that task. Team members can review Work Items, Query them, transfer them, and subscribe to them so they are notified of updates. Work Items act as a critical element of the Jazz Collaboration Model.