IBM Corp has a bizarre plan to mobilize a relay of software development teams in Belarus, China, India, Latvia and the US to create JavaBeans. As the sun goes down on Tsinghua University, the team will pass its day’s work on to the IBM programming facility in Seattle, where a day’s work will be added on it before it is passed on to Latvia or Belarus or India. Each team will work on various JavaBeans under the overall control of the Seattle lab, which will keep the others in line by using the Lotus Domino Internet collaboration server. Seattle will also take on the quality assurance and usability testing, and will ensure consistent look and feel among JavaBeans. IBM’s TeamConnection software will manage development cycles, providing configuration management, version control and problem tracking; resulting VisualAge PartPaks will launch this year.