Raptorous.net

A couple of days ago, Rational announced Jazz, which is a suped up version of Eclipse. My project at IBM dealt heavily with Jazz, so now that Jazz is announced, I can say what I've been working on.

Bluegrass is the project that I've been working on at IBM over the past seven months. It's a virtual world embedded in an IDE. Bluegrass is targeted towards distributed software development teams. It helps them communicate and brainstorm about project ideas in the virtual world.

The three main objectives were:
1. To serve as a visualization for the team artifacts.

Various team artifacts such as how the team is doing overall, or what work each member has been doing is shown in world. This helps with team awareness of what's going on with the team.

2. To provide tools for brainstorming meta-work.

We provide a method for users to create post-it like bubbles that they can arrange in any way they like. Users can import images and other information from online resources. There is a save/load capability to store your past brainstorming sessions.

3. Give users a social place to hang out and get to know each other.

We implemented several social games and tools that users could play with to give users a topic of conversation. We also connected with outside data sources like the corporate directory and corporate facebook application to give users more of an idea of who the people are.

I guess seeing the thing is the best thing, and we have a video in IBM's codestation in Second Life, where you can see it. The SLurl for it is:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/IBMCODESTATION/124/159/25/

Also, there has been a bunch of press coverage about Bluegrass. Here are some links to some articles:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/23308.wss
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/14/jazz-bluegrass_1.html
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/IBM-Opens-Jazz-to-Developers/
http://dusanwriter.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/ibm-launches-project-bluegrass-virtual-world-collaboration-tool/