Scotty, beam me up!

Scotty, beam me up!

Today already is the last day of the RSDC. I had a great time. Yesterday the keynote was presented by William Shatner. He basically talked how about riding horses and punching wrestlers for the movies was almost the same as developing software. It actually did make some sense, and he's Captain Kirk, so it was cool anyway. 🙂 For the evening event IBM rented the Universal Studio park. We already visited the park before the conference started, but somehow the rides are a lot more fun at night, or maybe it was because of the beers. 😉 A lot of great rides there, the new Simpsons ride is really amazing.

The conference is getting more and more in-depth. While Monday was mostly introduction talks, the past few days we really got to get nuts on all the details. Several opportunities to meet up with the lead people behind the tools and processes.

I talked a bit with Jean-Michel on the Jazz SCM system. You might know him as an author on the Eclipse RCP book, which is on my desk at work right now. We danced a bit with my favorite horror use-case for most SCM tools: deleting and restoring files with history and merged changes. The Jazz SCM was able to pull this off, although some puzzling was still involved. The SCM is really innovative, in some aspects it takes a best of breed by combining the single repository model with lightweight distributed collaboration using change sets. I talked to several other Jazz project members as well, it's great to go deep and find out about stuff that is either planned or intentionally not in the tool, or just a new idea no one thought of yet. It will be really interesting how all these plans and ideas will evolve over the next year.

Rational Team Concert will be available as a free version, express and standard. Only the standard edition has the work item customization feature right now and I think that is a shame. Jazz is all about being able to tweak the tools for your process and work items and work item work flow are an essential part of that process. I opened a work item on the Jazz project, because with enough support it might be possible to get some extra check marks on the feature list. Please comment to support my work item if you agree work item customization should be for everyone!