Hi, David.

I think you may be confused about what Jazz' process enactment supports.
We allow teams to link to documentation as you describe, but this is not
what we call process enactment.

The process specification isn't a reference document. It is a
configuration file which dictates the behavior of the Jazz client and
server.

If you haven't already, I encourage you to download Jazz and experiment
with the process enactment examples that we include.

- Jared

david wrote:

I had the opportunity to attend a few Jazz sessions at CASCON 07 last
week where the speakers emphasized the level of process support in
Jazz. I work for a software process solution provider and it appears
to us that the term process may be overstated in Jazz. Most of the
process enactment examples that I have seen are related to the rules
specified in the process specification and although useful, do not
appear to directly assist users in following the chosen software
development process. In Jazz, the software development process seems
to have been reduced to a textual description and web site which can
make it difficult for teams to meet their governance objectives. We
are wondering if the Jazz team has any plans to enhance their
software development process instantiation and compliancy monitoring
support. We understand that the software development process should
not dictate the enactment but rather be a guiding hand to assist
practitioners and managers to meet their objectives.

Our customers currently use IRIS Process Author to manage their
software development processes and create VSTS process templates
which they can use with IRIS Process Live to enact their projects
using the VSTS platform. We are now considering extending our
offerings to provide authoring and enactment support using the Jazz
platform as well. IRIS Process Author is a web-based software
development process management system for organizations that are
looking for a scalable authoring and tailoring environment that is
process neutral. It enables organizations to blend industry content
with their own proven practices to establish a set of process assets
that are tailored for their environment in a reusable manner.

Is the Jazz team open to collaborate with other vendors that are
interested in adding their own commercial extensions to Jazz?

Thanks,
Dave

David,

In Jazz process has two aspects:
- executable process rules
- a textual process description

Executable process rules are given in a formal description interpretable
by the jazz process runtime. This formal description is given in the
process specification.

Executable process rules come in two flavors:
1) Rules that apply to a project as a whole. These rules cannot be
customized/changed on a per iteration basis. Take work item types as one
example.
2) Rules that are team and iteration specific. These rules can be
defined in a way that they can be shared between teams and across
iterations. Take the required fields of a work item as one example.

Jazz components declare which of their aspects/operations are process
enabled and thus can be control by which kind of executable process
rules. The set of aspects is currently limited but nevertheless already
rather powerful and we will extend it over time. Our focus has been on a
smaller set of aspects and rules that suffice to understand what the
process runtime and the authoring tooling for the executable rules
should look like.

The textual process description is currently just that: a textual
description of the process given in html. This usually includes a
description of the formal, executable rules and a description of the not
yet formalized or not formalizable aspects such as best practices,
values, etc.

The link between the executable process rules and the process
description is otherwise weak in the current version. We envision a
stronger link and have demoed early thinking of this stronger link in
collaboration with the RMC team at RSDC 2007. That prototype extended
the notion of the process description with formal aspects such as
descriptions of jazz work items that could be created out of the tooling
used to read the process description. Other formal aspects are
instantiating work product other than work items from work product
templates.

We have not yet followed up on this RSDC work and have not yet
incorporated these aspects into the jazz process platform. We certainly
plan to do so although we can not yet provide a detailed timeline.


Regards, Kai



david wrote:

Hi Jared,

Thanks for the quick response. I think some of the process,
specification and description terminology may be causing some of my
confusion. At CASON when the folks were talking about process, I
think they were referring to the process specification because as you
have pointed out they were talking about configuring the behaviour of
Jazz. This caused a bit of confusion for my team since we work in
software process modeling and typically use process to refer to
software development processes such as RUP, OpenUp, or Eclipse Way
instead of the rules and policies used to configure the tools.

I am still new to Jazz and have only completed a few examples, but
when I asked the folks at CASCON whether there was a way to
instantiate portions of the process description as work items, they
informed me that there is no way to do this today. We are wondering
how the work items can be traced back to the software process
definition (e.g. OpenUp) that governs the project. Without such
traceability, it may be difficult to gather process metrics that can
be used to track governance objectives as well as provide process
engineers valuable input for process improvement.

We have also recognized that our IRIS Process Author product can be
used to create process definitions and templates for Jazz similar to
how EPF Composer has been used to create the default OpenUp and
Eclipse Way templates. If fact, we also have a product that takes
EPFC/RMC processes into VSTS. One of the things we have done with
our IRIS Process Live product on VSTS is allowed users to instantiate
process elements as work items directly from the process description
and we thought this could be applicable to Jazz as well. For
example, one or more activities could be selected in the process
description and the system could instantiate them, their child tasks
and input/output work products as work items to be assigned to users
or further broken down into sub-tasks.

I will continue to experiment with Jazz. Can you suggest any examples
that might provide behavior similar with I have described?

Thanks,
Dave


Hi, David.

I think you may be confused about what Jazz' process enactment
supports.
We allow teams to link to documentation as you describe, but this is
not
what we call process enactment.

The process specification isn't a reference document. It is a
configuration file which dictates the behavior of the Jazz client
and
server.

If you haven't already, I encourage you to download Jazz and
experiment
with the process enactment examples that we include.

- Jared

david wrote:
I had the opportunity to attend a few Jazz sessions at CASCON 07
last
week where the speakers emphasized the level of process support in
Jazz. I work for a software process solution provider and it
appears
to us that the term process may be overstated in Jazz. Most
of the
process enactment examples that I have seen are related to the
rules
specified in the process specification and although useful, do not
appear to directly assist users in following the chosen software
development process. In Jazz, the software development process
seems
to have been reduced to a textual description and web site which
can
make it difficult for teams to meet their governance objectives.
We
are wondering if the Jazz team has any plans to enhance their
software development process instantiation and compliancy
monitoring
support. We understand that the software development process
should
not dictate the enactment but rather be a guiding hand to assist
practitioners and managers to meet their objectives.

Our customers currently use IRIS Process Author to manage their
software development processes and create VSTS process templates
which they can use with IRIS Process Live to enact their projects
using the VSTS platform. We are now considering extending our
offerings to provide authoring and enactment support using the Jazz
platform as well. IRIS Process Author is a web-based software
development process management system for organizations that are
looking for a scalable authoring and tailoring environment that is
process neutral. It enables organizations to blend industry
content
with their own proven practices to establish a set of process
assets
that are tailored for their environment in a reusable manner.

Is the Jazz team open to collaborate with other vendors that are
interested in adding their own commercial extensions to Jazz?

Thanks,
Dave

Hey David,

We are absolutely open to working with other software providers to have their offerings work with our Jazz-based offerings. This is one of the reasons why we based Jazz on Eclipse, on both the client and server, and why we are doing its development in the open. The venue for this work with partners is here at jazz.net. Over time, you'll see our partner programs, e.g. "Ready for Rational", evolve to encompass our Jazz-based products as those products become available. Our partner programs are non-exclusive, and open to all.

John Kellerman
Product Manager, Jazz and Eclipse