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I'm trying to make sense of IBM Jazz. I'm trying to figure out what it is, and what it isn't. "Streams" have been giving me trouble. From IBM's online library:

The stream is similar in concept to a branch in most other version control systems. However, there are some significant differences that enable specific operations when using Rational Team Concert.

They loudly lambast freeware solutions for their handling of the development patterns that use branching:

It is true that many agile teams use freeware or low-cost development tools that offer limited support for segregated development. Such tools often put developers off of a segregated approach due to functional limitations and the high overhead of integration within such tools. Rational Team Concert is a mechanism for many agile teams to raise their game and take their development capability to the next level in terms of efficiency, flexibility, and the creativity that can be engineered into their development processes.

However, in all the documentation I have read so far, I am having trouble finding anything that Jazz Streams do which have not been de facto standard behaviors for branches for the last 20 or so years.

Is there anything to Jazz Streams that is unique enough to keep in mind as I continue making sense of Jazz, or should I just write them off as IBM adding branching and electing to call it something different?

Michael Blackburn
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Cort Ammon
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    I've been using Jazz for years now, and I've mentally always been treating them as branches. So yeah, I totally go by your last sentence. I find that Jazz' strengths aren't necessarily it's SCM, but the integration into the whole suite. – SBI Aug 20 '15 at 18:41

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In my current shop, Streams are tied to Builds, which thereby controls the targets available to deploy to. The "Development" stream is only associated with builds targeting the Dev & Test servers, while only the Integration and Production Streams are associated with Builds targeting Staging or Production.

Yeah, you can still do that using Branches, but as @SBI said, the benefit is in the integration with the change-management suite. I prefer to keep branches as "topic branches" -- a strictly development task.

Michael Blackburn
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