We gave out copies of Agile for Dummies and Service Virtualization for Dummies, and people were excited to pick up their complimentary copies…not for themselves, of course. Possibly for their bosses or coworkers who might not know as much about Agile or Service Virtualization as they do.

If you weren’t able to stop by our booth, don’t worry, you can get your own electronic copies:

Electronic copy of Agile for Dummies

Electronic copy of Service Virtualization for Dummies

Since we were promoting Agile for Dummies and Service Virtualization for Dummies, The Dummy stopped by our booth to hang out. I had several people ask me if I would take a picture of them with The Dummy. I mean, who could resist this photo opp?

After introducing people to various Jazz applications like Rational Team Concert or JazzHub, people would ask me where they could go to learn more. jazz.net is our central hub for everything Jazz related; here you can find learning resources, product information, downloads, our forum, the Jazz Team Blog, and more.

I’ve complied a list of some of my favorite resources to get you started:

• https://jazz.net/devops explains how we and our customers are putting DevOps into action.
• At https://jazz.net/agile you can discover how Scrum teams are using Rational Team Concert to successfully manage their projects.
• The Jazz Products page has links to current Jazz offerings product pages where you can find video overviews, a list of what’s new, a list of features and capabilities, and video tours for our offerings like Rational Requirements Composer, Rational Team Concert, and Rational Quality Manager.
• Visit https://hub.jazz.net/learn to learn more about JazzHub, your place for software development in the cloud.

Several of our existing customers stopped by our booth to say hello. They commonly asked me if some feature they wanted currently existed in the product. Sometimes I knew the answer, and sometimes I didn’t. But the great thing was that since I had an internet connection, I was able to go to jazz.net to search for the answer.

While I was at the booth, I posted a question on the jazz.net forum that a Rational Team Concert user asked me. The user came back a couple of hours later to check in, and we had received a response. The feature he was requesting did not exist, so I opened a work item to track his request.

Many of our customers who stopped by didn’t realize the forum existed or that they could directly request features and report defects. So please spread the word! You can ask questions directly to our development team and other users in the community on the jazz.net forum. If you want to request a feature or report a defect, visit https://jazz.net/mystuff, and click Submit a bug.

This was probably the most popular question I was asked. We were giving away t-shirts that read “‘Stand Up’ for Agile” on the front and “No blockers” on the back. What Agilista could resist these shirts?

This question typically came after I realized the person visiting our booth was a professor, and I said, “You can use JazzHub in the classroom.” JazzHub is your place for software development in the cloud. In fact, JazzHub began as a pilot program for academic users to be able to use Rational Team Concert in the cloud.

As a former software engineering teaching assistant at North Carolina State University (Go Pack!), I believe there are two major advantages to using JazzHub in the classroom:

1. Your students get experience using enterprise quality software, preparing them for industry work. They will be able to track their entire projects from writing the requirements to implementation to verification, all from within JazzHub.
2. You don’t have to handle any of the server maintenance yourself. As a teaching assistant, I stayed plenty busy working with students, grading assignments, and running the labs; I didn’t need to add server management to my list of tasks. Students can create their own projects on JazzHub and invite their team members, so you don’t have to worry about setting up anything yourself.

We are still running our Academic JazzHub, but new users may find our latest version of JazzHub that is open to everyone a better fit. Simply ask your students to register for JazzHub. One student from each team can create a private project and invite his or her other teammates as well as the teaching staff. With private projects, only the members of the team will be able to view the project artifacts. Once the projects are created, your students are ready to start planning and coding.

A great way to find what’s new is to surf around our Jazz Team Blog. Typically, whenever we publish a new release, we accompany it with a blog post explaining the major differences. Below is a list of some of the more recent posts:

• Top 5 Reasons to Upgrade to 4.0.3
• CLM 4.0.3 is here!
• JazzHub Beta 3 Now Available: Click. Code. Create.
• CLM 4.0.2 is here!
• CLM 4.0.1 is here!
• CLM 2012 is here! Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, and Rational Requirements Composer 4.0 now available

My new friend Bryon Westmoreland gets the award for the most random question. When he found out I work from home every day, Bryon wanted to know if I actually get dressed for work. For the record, I do put clothes on when I go to work…they just happen to be very, very comfy clothes.