IBM Garage tunes up clients for multi-cloud projects

Big Blue continues to enhance its IBM Garage method to help organizations move to the cloud and implement a variety of services, from AI and machine learning to IoT and blockchain, as part of their digital transformation strategies.

The five year-old IBM Garage methodology combines Agile techniques and DevOps expertise, architectures and toolchains, to help both startups and enterprise customers launch new cloud projects that relate to digital transformation. It takes customers through the entire software development lifecycle, from generation of the idea for the project, to development, to deployment, to production and scaling the deployed system to meet enterprise needs.

The Garage method encourages users to build in one-week iterations using test-driven development, continuous integration, pair programming, and refactoring. Using three lifecycle phases now known as Co-Create, Co-Execute and Co-Operate, IBM takes its Garage clients from an idea to a production pilot in four to eight weeks, said Rachel Reinitz, an IBM Fellow and CTO of the IBM Garage. Companies from four-person startups to multinational enterprises have come through the IBM Garage for help with their cloud deployments, she said.

The IBM Garage has expanded in multiple dimensions since the company opened the first Garage in San Francisco in April 2014. One of the most recent tweaks to the IBM Garage method is expanded support for popular languages and frameworks, including Angular, React, Node.js and, of course, Java.

IBM teams throughout the company also have adopted the Garage method. Development teams widely use Garage method practices, particularly in IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software areas and the IBM CIO office, Reinitz said. This includes concepts such as Enterprise Design Thinking, Lean Startup, eXtreme Programming, Agile and many DevOps practices.

Rachel Reinitz

The Garage method is also shaped by and harvests from the IBM development teams, Reinitz said. For example, many of the CI/CD, operations, management and site reliability engineering practices are based on IBM's experiences running scalable cloud services. The Enterprise Design Thinking practices, which focus on applying Design Thinking to an enterprise, come from IBM's experience transforming IBM to be a design-led company, she said.

IBM's Garage Methodology also has spread throughout IBM Services, to combine cloud adoption and transformation best practices. This involves expanding Garage methodology training from hundreds to thousands of consultants, and to cover a broader variety of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud technologies, Reinitz said.

"IBM Garage is an interesting example of something the company is especially good at doing: developing services based on what were once internal IBM projects and processes," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT in Hayward, Calif. "IBM has taken the lessons and benefits gained from its own Garage-like efforts and repackaged them for commercial use."

IBM now has 16 purpose-built Garage spaces across the globe, with the newest ones in Raleigh, N.C., and Milan, Italy. The Garage capability is available in many IBM locations across the world, particularly in IBM Studios, and IBM also has set up Garages at some client locations, Reinitz said. IBM Garage Method boot camps are specialized for different audiences from executives to designers to developers, and from IBMers to business partners and clients.