TheServerSide has interviewed Erich Gamma about the IBM/Rational Jazz project.

Here are some answers that I’ve found interesting:

On Eclipse, the focus was on how to make an individual developer more productive. With Jazz, we are looking to teams with the goal of making teams and teams of teams more productive. To do so requires tool support across all phases of the software lifecycle.

The biggest challenge [projects face today] is to ship quality software on time in the face of changing requirements and often geographically distributed teams. This is hard. It requires talented people. This cannot be tooled away. A key lesson is that transparency in software development enables feedback loops, which improve predictability. With transparency also comes accountability, a key ingredient for a healthy project.

Jazz is process-aware. The first process we are working on integrating into Jazz is the “Eclipse way”, the process we breathe ourselves. However, Jazz is designed to be open for other processes and we expect that over time many other processes will become available for Jazz.

Other interesting aspects are that Jazz is extensible on both the client and the server. In particular, we are using the same Eclipse-based extension mechanism not only on the client, but also on the server. We are leveraging the work from the Eclipse Equinox project.