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Maybe he was selling old tools that IBM was trying to retire / migrate from.

Based on how many places I've seen it in industry he could have been shilling for IBM ClearCase, or "IBM Jazz" (who the hell came up with that platform name?).

I can see how commission for them easily adds up while being a technical debt burden on everyone.

I'd be interested in the overall answer here. I use Eclipse with a lot of additional standard addons (ECF, WTP, TPTP, etc) and would like to find something useful to use a task management that I can share with coworkers or work towards overall goals. I bet Eclipse has something for this already built in, but I'm just not using it properly.

I'm contemplating a bugzilla setup since it looks like it integrates nicely, It might be overkill though and not fit your guidelines.

Another tool I'm looking at is jazz concert that seems to include lots of tools for just what you are looking for. I haven't used it but if I get some time after the holidays, might test it out.

I highly recommend you take a look at IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) Express-C:
https://jazz.net/downloads/rational-team-concert/releases/2.0/

It is 100% free for up to 3 users. RTC is based on Jazz (jazz.net), a sophisticated, collaborative software delivery platform from IBM Rational. Erich Gamma, one of the technical leads for Jazz, recently responded to questions about Jazz and other topics from Slashdot users in an interview:
http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/09/07/08/1851209/Jazz-Technical-Lead-Erich-Gamma-Answers-Your-Questions

In any case, RTC will do many things for a team. It integrates directly with Eclipse or Visual Studio, and there is also a web UI. Installation is a breeze, too, as it comes with Tomcat and Derby. Here are some specifics:
- Work items are a key aspect of the product, as users are able to create work items of different types (defects, enhancements, tasks, stories, etc.), assign ownership of these work items to others in the project area, and collaborate using these work items through comments, attachments, approval/reviewer processes, and RSS/Atom feeds. Users are also able to enter planned versus actual work hours, so they can track their team load.
- There is an integrated SCM component for version control that users can leverage directly in Eclipse or Visual Studio. It is stream-based, and allows users to deliver multiple changes at one in a single change set. Change sets may be associated with work items so it's easy to see what changes were made for a particular work item, or why a change set was delivered.
- There is also an integrated build engine that uses Ant, so you can incorporate existing Ant scripts very easily. The integrated build component allows users to request a build on an ad-hoc or scheduled basis, and automatically retains a snapshot of the files in each build so they can be easily reproduced. Also, it maintains build histories, provides JUnit test results, and allows users to easily track the contents of each build.

There's a wealth of other useful functionality, as well. Check out jazz.net and see for yourself!

Murad

The following post from an RTC user on the jazz forums might also be interesting for this discussion. It compares RTC with SVN, Jira, Cruisecontrol etc. https://jazz.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4383

Thanks for the feedback. Your admonition about not slapping the Jazz label on everything is something we have to be careful about and don't always succeed on. I guess I don't see the contradiction that you do - why can't Jazz be a technology platform and an initiative? Jazz is not a web site, though we obviously have a web site (with a nice short URL). I looked at the About page you referenced (https://jazz.net/about/) and it's basically accurate, though in sort of IBM Professional English.

Here's how I would explain Jazz to another developer if I ran into him or her at a conference:

"I work on a technology at IBM called Jazz. What we're trying to do is make it easier for teams of people to build better software by making it easier for them to collaborate together. We're building a core technology stack ("Jazz") and we're building a bunch of products on top of it that address different parts of the software lifecycle - e.g. requirements, development, testing, build, move to production. If Jazz is going to succeed as a platform, we have to make it very possible to tie a lot of data together. You see, one of the things that we've learned is that it's not physically possible for human beings to build a single tool that solves every problem - the complexity is too great the interdependencies between components is too brittle. We believe that the only way all of these tools are going to work together is to define simple standard protocols and simple standard formats (open service for lifecycle collaboration - http://open-services.net/) built on top of standard Internet and web protocols (like http) and formats like AtomPub. Our Jazz-based products integrate together using this sort of loosely coupled web style and we're starting to integrate with business partners as well. Another thing I like about working on Jazz is the fact that we develop in the open at Jazz.net. Many of the leaders on our project like Erich Gamma, John Wiegand, and Dave Thomson came from Eclipse, and from that experience they came to realize that software turns out better when you open high-bandwidth direct channels with your users and extenders, so we're doing that with Jazz, even though it's commercial software."

That's about as simple as I can make it. I'm not sure if you're trying to understand or just to throw stones. If you'd like to learn more, there's some good info at Jazz.net, we're on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/IBMJazz) or you can find a bunch of us on Twitter. http://jazz.net/community/twitter/. If you still think it's a bunch of marketing B.S. then that's that, but we have quite a few happy users, and we're working hard to make it better.

Did you look at http://jazz.net/ or IBM.com pages? We've tried to eliminate gobbledygook from Jazz.net. If you're seeing it, it's a bug :-)

Use Jazz. It's Eclipse IDE with integrated team features such as bug tracking, source control, planning and reports. Erich Gamma architected that product to make it easy to grow a project from one developer to a small team to a big team to many teams etc.

Jazz Tutorial

I've seen the demos at EclipseCon and my team uses the recently shipped 1.0 version. I don't want to return to separate IDE/cvs/bugzilla. Jazz Team Concert Client just makes it easy to find what my team members are working on, what has been done, what is in the build etc.

Good luck! Try different products and reexamine how your team works after every milestone or release. Team work is always to reinvent.

What is Jazz?

Developing software in a team is much like playing an instrument in a band. Both require a balance of collaboration and virtuosity. Jazz defines a vision for the way products can integrate to support this kind of collaborative work, and a technology platform to deliver on this vision.

Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. We believe Jazz will help teams build software more effectively while making the software development activity more productive and enjoyable.

Jazz is a technology platform, not a product. Product offerings that are built on the Jazz platform will be able to leverage a rich set of capabilities for team-based software development and delivery. Rational Team Concert Express will be the first of a planned family of Rational Team Concert offerings built on Jazz technology.

Most of us haven't heard of it because it has been in a closed private pilot program, now open to all of us.

I love when I can actually RTFA and still have no idea what the product is. So I found these videos of Jazz which should be helpful. But this is one of those "platform" things where they aren't actually selling anything... But my interpretation is that they're essentially trying to put together a code repository (ala Subversion) with Bugtraq with mailing list with instant message.

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