Enforcing Team Cooperation (ETC) using Rational software tools: merging universities and IBM effort together

The goal of ETC project is the usage of modern software engineering tools in the everyday student life in order to enforce the students’ collaboration and to provide them a modern working experience. With Rational solutions the students have experienced a new learning way, in a modern fashion, cooperating together, either in the same course, in different courses and in different universities, acting like a distributed team. This platform allows to the University and to the students to overcome the traditional limitations, allows them to cooperate, share the assets and experiences, improve strongly their skills of tutor and fostering a general mutual collaboration. The main needs addressed were: 1. Train a better generation of students, able to compete at best in the future work market. 2. Need to support the teaching of software engineering disciplines with high level, high quality, industrial tools. 3. Opportunities for students to use modern technologies for design, development, testing and quality control. 4. Try to use in University courses some industrial tools and methodology. 5. Reuse of communication paradigms used in the Internet (chat, collaboration, web 2.0, social web, mashups) into the university context, using a modern platform, built for software lifecycle management. 6. Real opportunity for the students to exercise their roles in educational projects. The experience of being truly in the roles of industrial projects such as analysts, designers, developers, testers, etc. is essential in software development and the average student unlikely to exercise them all during their course of study. 7. Since the courses, for obvious reasons, cover a span of several years to provide all the necessary skills required for the roles mentioned above, it was necessary that these tools should enable students to interact with each other, although not belonging to the same course maybe with the role each of which was studying the discipline in this time period. This method is thought enhances the transfer of knowledge because it encourages collaborative interaction among students and allows the creation of a real team, potentially including all the necessary roles, epitomized by students of various courses. 8. Extend the previous concept of a possible interaction covering the whole population between the various Italian scientific student universities was a very quick pace and led to want to enable more than one university in this kind of experience. 9. Obtain an ecosystem that could serve as an incubator for future extensions, amplifier innovative ideas for teaching and the university context. 10. By IBM was the desire to create innovative and unique experience that could enhance both the university work and the characteristics of the Jazz platform, created to enable heterogeneous and distributed teams to a fruitful collaboration.