Once again, I ad the pleasure of talking with Erich Gamma, currently lead of the IBM Rational Jazz project. We catch up on the recent developments in the Jazz world, discuss managing large, geo-distributed teams, and then talk about the upcoming release of Rational Team Concert, based on Jazz.

We start out discussing the different parts of Jazz as I observe that I tend to think of Jazz as one unit when, in fact, there are several sub-systems that would seem to be emerging as Rational products. I then ask Erich how people have been using Jazz.net as it's become more open. On the topic of Jazz, Erich then talks about the use of dashboards and other report-like features in Jazz to help monitor teams with an eye towards improvement.

Following up on a discussion in Open Season #13 about geo-distributed teams, I ask Erich to give us his quick-take on how you take a small, local team to a large, multi-site one. He suggests using people to spread the team practices and culture, sort of virally spreading good project management and also says that iterations are key to getting such large teams breathing and synched up.

We then discuss how people can get ahold of Jazz and what the terms are for continuing to use Jazz after the beta trial. For commercial users, that use is unknown, but IBM has recently committed to providing Jazz for free to open source projects and (some?) universities.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, as is Eclipse who's EclipseCon conference we filmed this at.