Let your VoiCE be heard

Well, I really should have posted this a week ago… For those of you that participate in Rational’s VoiCE program, we’ll be presenting OSLC tomorrow (Tuesday) during the VoiCE online conference. We already have a lot of participants signed up, and there’s always room for more. Please join us for the latest updates on OSLC.

Back from Agile2009, and the community grows

OK, I’ve been back from Agile2009 for a few weeks now so I’m a little tardy in posting. It was a very worthwhile trip for me personally. I was surprised and impressed with how sophisticated the Agile world has become in areas such as the realities of project management; the dynamics of collaboration and groups/teams (e.g. the importance of peer recognition in motivating high performers); and the implications of understanding software development as an information process rather than a manufacturing process. I still meet a lot of people who dismiss Agile as merely an excuse for programmers to throw off design discipline and project management; and I think those people need to take another look.

Of course, that’s not the main reason I was there. My justification was to recruit participants in OSLC, of course, and I’m happy to say that I was delighted with the response. I managed to chat with a good handful of prominent Agile tools vendors and was heartened by the reactions. There was some natural skepticism about the motivations of a big, traditional company with a commercial product portfolio like IBM, but just about everybody I spoke with very quickly — if not immediately — saw that we were genuine in our belief that growing the market was good for everybody, and therefore good for us. A big “shout out” to Mik Kersten of Tasktop is appropriate here:  everybody I met had already heard about OSLC from him, and his endorsement was a big help in opening minds and opening doors among this audience.

Meet me at Agile2009

I’m going to be at Agile2009, so if you want to talk face-to-face about OSLC, this is a great chance to meet. Just leave a comment below and we’ll try to connect.

I did not expect that

One of the most active efforts at OSLC is project estimation. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising: Objectively, there’s a lot of business value in having better integration between project management and cost and success probability estimation. Project estimation may not seem exciting to the average programmer, but it is essential to business success. And since there’s a lot of different project management tools in use, including a lot of home-brew, and a lot of variation in the definitions of even fundamental concepts like “effort” it seems like a compelling candidate for the Open Services approach.

The surprising part to me is that this topic is generating so much activity and interest at OSLC. I was expecting something much more mundane to be leading the pack in the early going. Perhaps one reason is an increasing focus on the business value of the software development portfolio. The most business-savvy companies are realizing that project management is a first step, and project portfolio management a good second step; but you’re not really managing software development as a business process until you’re managing risk and the likelihood of success.

If project success matters to you, check it out.

OSLC Podcast Goes Live

You can listen or download at from Developerworks. Feedback welcome!

Podcasting Open Services

Steve Abrams, Mik Kersten from TaskTop Technologies and myself recorded a podcast last week — I’ll post a pointer when it goes up on DeveloperWorks. But one question was so thought provoking that I wanted to blog about it right away. Scott Laningham, the moderator of the podcast, asked: What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about OSLC in the past year? For me, it’s learning to think about Open Services in terms of what it means for people, rather than tools. Working inside a tools vendor, it’s easy to get caught up in focusing on the needs of tools and tool interfaces and data exchange, and to forget that all of that only matters if it helps some person be more effective in their work.

So I have a new “elevator pitch” response when people ask me what OSLC is all about. Open Services is all about making it easier for professional developers to be more productive and more effective, by eliminating unnecessary barriers between the tools that they and their colleagues use.

Congratulations to the Change Management workteam!

The Change Management workteam became the first OSLC stream to release a 1.0 spec. As Rational’s own tools adopt this spec, it’s going to be a lot easier for outsiders to integrate with our products. We know it’s certainly going to make our own integration scenarios easier.

This is an impressive achievement in many ways. It’s always tough to be the first group to go through a process, and in many ways the CM workteam has been the “beta testers” of a very different way of doing collaboration. They’ve learned a lot along the way both about what kinds of interfaces are useful in a loosely-coupled architecture, and about how to discover the requirements, for example by focusing on scenarios. You can read more and join the conversation at the open-services.net wiki.

Welcome to the Open Services Blog

Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration, or OSLC, is two new things.

It’s a new way of connecting the artifacts that software developers care about — requirements, tests, plans, code, and everything in-between. And its a new way of defining those connections — a process that takes place entirely in the open, and that aims to be not merely vendor-neutral but architecture-neutral.

This blog is the place to come if you want to follow the overall progress on the initiative and news about it, rather than fine details of what’s going on in specific OSLC workteams. (The place to go for that is the OSLC wiki.)