Collaborative Software Development: Working With Partners Around The World

http://www.ibm.com/software/rational/innovate/

Martin Nally of IBM speaks about the changing business models around software creation. There are more outsourcing and co-sourcing arrangements, as well as more development teams that collaborate from different countries. These partnerships create challenges including how to manage communication between teams that are distributed around the world, and how to manage deliverables and contracts across the different partners. Rational products offers tools like source code management systems and requirements management tools to help maintian the integrity of these collaborations.

[Martin Nally, IBM]
Im Martin Nally; Im the Chief Technology Officer for Rational Software, and my job is to provide the overall technical direction for Rationals product portfolio.

One large change that we see is in the business models around software creation. More and more of our customers are engaged in partnerships where they will outsource portions of their software development projects or in co-sourcing arrangements, where they will partner with a service provider on a project. And we also see more and more distribution of software development around the world where these partnership will involved teams in Asia, teams in Europe, teams in the Americas who all have to collaborate together in order to produce a result.

Some of the challenges that those partnership create include how I communicate and collaborate with teams that are distributed around the world, and how I manage deliverables, contracts and expectations across the different partners who are collaborating to produce software.

Rational has a broad and mature portfolio products to address the basics of software development. Compilers for compiling source, source code management systems for managing source, and development environments in which programmers work, testing environments, requirements management tools, and so on and so forth. Increasingly, as our industry matures, as IBMs customers mature, and as Rational matures as a brand, were focusing our energies on products that address some of the higher level issues of software development. And how do I manage quality, for example, from end to end, from the requirements, through the architectures, to implementation, testing and final deployment. And how do I make the bigger decisions on which things to buy versus which things to build, or to select the most valuable projects to develop that are aligned with the goals and strategies of the business.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• requirements management
• quality management
• IBM Rational
• IBM
• Martin Nally