I had a chat earlier today with Tony Grout from IBM. Tony is the business value leader for Rational Software – a bit of a mouthful, but essentially he is the guru for all things Rational.

I can remember using Rational Rose years ago when I was involved in software development, so I was interested in finding out how things have moved on and how these kinds of tools can facilitate better development in an outsourced environment.

I don’t really like to plug any particular products on this blog, but it’s a fact that global teams need some glue to hold them together – which was exactly what I wanted to ask Tony about.

One of the first things I asked was how customers or external people could interact with the software development team if they don’t have all the fancy tools being used by the internal team. Typically this might be when a customer has outsourced some software development – how can they stay on top of what is going on when the team are not their employees?

Tony said: “If people want to see how we believe software development should work, they can login to the www.jazz.net web site and see the view of the world that our own Jazz development team has.

“All those tools can be replicated to create a new environment for any customer – and it removes the need to create specific metrics, because everything is automatically measured within the development environment. The Rational Team Concert product just makes metrics transparent to the team as they just carry on doing their job.”

I thought that was quite impressive. The IBM team is making its own live work environment public on the internet just to prove how customers can monitor a remote team. It’s admiral for them to be doing that when most corporates seem to be scared of letting their own staff write a blog.

Tony elaborated on why his own products are better than just trying to ensure everyone is using a standard environment – something I was interested in exploring because I wanted to understand how I might justify investing in the tools.

“Once you go global you increase delivery risk and so you need some management – just enough management. This kind of platform is about giving you just enough management to control those global teams. It’s a bit like a golf swing, you need the grip to be just right because if you hold it too tight then you will be in the rough,” he said.

I asked Tony about any ongoing developments, anything new they are planning to introduce and he said: “The whole of the Rational ethos in future is building in collaboration on how business and software teams work together – you will see wikis, IM, presence awareness in there.

“You can build various information feeds into the platform. For example you can include feeds from Twitter, so information can be shared in a number of ways. There is a lot going on and a lot of the social tools on the internet can be used within the development environment.”

Software development has not really changed a lot over the years at a basic level of programmer and screen full of code, but it looks like the process of collaboration between developers and other team members is getting more sophisticated.

Certainly, tools like this are making it easier to operate across borders, something essential when outsourcing to remote teams. I’d be interested to hear from anyone using these tools or alternatives from other suppliers.