Tasktop

We’ve spent the last decade watching the shifts and trends in an industry that is eating the world. Software is increasingly becoming the basis for competitive advantage in nearly every industry. As Tasktop has evolved from an organization that focused solely on the developer to an organization that is now focused on the end-to-end aspects of delivering software from idea to plans to code to tests to operations, we’ve learned a ton about software delivery and what it takes to be successful. Our customers have shared their challenges and struggles with us. All too often, these conversations are captured on white boards, where we help customers think through how they deliver software at a technical level but not necessarily as a business process.

Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) is based on several decades of experience and knowledge. From Mik’s days at Xerox Parc and Intentional, Gail’s academic underpinnings, Dave’s experience with the Rational Unified Process and talking to thousands of customers and ISVs as a Research Director at Forrester, Nicole’s days at Borland working with their software lifecycle tools, Betty’s time developing go-to-market strategies at SmartBear, Lance’s experiences with modern requirements technologies at Accept, and even my view from a pure business world bouncing back and forth between startups and behemoth organizations developing software, we’ve all coalesced at Tasktop because each of us in our own way have lived the problems that we are trying to solve with SLI and our products. On top of the intuition that those experiences from our past provide us, the conversations with our customers and partners that we’ve been having since Tasktop started in January 2007 have been equally important. In many ways, it feels like this bootstrapped team of nearly 60 people have unbeknownst been working on Software Lifecycle Integration since the beginning. So needless to say, we think SLI is going to be big, really big!

As my colleague Dave West reminds me nearly every day, software has enabled the automation of nearly every business process (e.g., supply chain, customer relationship, purchasing, logistics) with one notable exception… itself. When you think about Software Delivery as a business process, it suddenly becomes clear as to why SLI matters. Integration is the underlying basis for automation. Without integration, business process automation is nearly impossible. Once information flows between the various constituents involved in the business process, all of sudden you have the basis for a tremendous amount of business value:

- a powerful Build, Measure, Learn loop for continuous improvement
- collaboration between disparate teams while still allowing the teams to have the freedom to choose tools and processes that make them most efficient and productive
- visibility and traceability between stakeholders that are the underpinnings of business insight

So integration matters fundamentally. At a macro level there is simply more demand for technologists than there is supply and this divergence is growing. Many people outside of technology are recognizing this e.g., in the 2013 State of the Union, President Obama called for the country to produce a million more STEM graduates in the next decade. That’s one way of solving the problem. We believe that if you can reduce the failures and delays in software delivery, if collaboration across the silos becomes the norm versus the exception, and wisdom can be gleaned form the business process of software delivery, software delivery productivity will go up dramatically. We believe the smooth flow of information between the people who need that information to do their jobs is the missing and required element to driving these outcomes.

To learn more and for a step by step methodology to help you make the business case for SLI in your organization, please see the Business Case for Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) white paper (registration required) or contact us. We’ve got a ton of white papers, videos, and other resources to help you learn more at www.tasktop.com/SLI. Please provide feedback and help us grow the SLI community by participating.

Lets be honest. I dread the “What do you do?” question in a bar or party setting. If I ever have to go beyond the “business manager in a private software company” line when introducing myself, the reaction is one that, at best, is an “Oh…” More likely, the person just looks for the first opportunity to walk away. Even the “but… but… I was a professional blackjack player…” or “I helped make a really cool ebook app…” or “My daughter really loves baseball…” usually doesn’t salvage the day.

The real answer to the question of “What do you do?” is that I work for a company that provides an integration platform to connect up the tools and people that produce software from idea to coding to deployment. Our customers are some of the largest companies in the world, and in nearly all cases, they build software not for the sake of commercializing it, but rather as a means to solving a problem or driving a competitive advantage in their respective industry, from banking, to insurance, to healthcare, to retail, to manufacturing, to government. We’re helping traditional businesses turn into software delivery organizations. Cheers to that.

When you think of integration, its just not sexy. Period.

Even though we are participating at SXSW Interactive this week as a stop on the SXSW Startup Crawl, and our CEO Mik Kersten has a talk on Monday evening, the reality is that we just aren’t as cool (or as young, truth be told) as a lot of the folks who do social or mobile or cloud. We do know what those words mean but our lot is all about creating a new kind of collaborative infrastructure for software delivery. We are at SXSW because our US HQs are located in Austin and because of my love of the SXSW event, even though Tasktop doesn’t fit neatly into an event that I often joke is short for “SeXy SoftWare”.

I promised Mik that I would pitch his SXSW talk, so here is the pitch… We’re also here to demonstrate how crucial it is to create a multi-vendor platform for software delivery collaboration if we are to make the next order of magnitude improvement in our ability to deliver software, as Mik will outline in his talk Social Code Graph: The Future of Open Source. Seriously, it is a marriage of a geeky topic with cool visualizations, and I would encourage you to attend and experience some of Mik’s passion and boundless energy.

So, this blog is my feeble attempt to explain what we do and explain why it is important. I wish it was containable within 140 characters. I wish it was containable in some pithy one-liner that I could use at the bar that would result in me being the life of the party. Every time I get it to 140 characters, it sounds like some sort of marketing jargon. So, what we have at Tasktop is great business that solves a really big problem that still takes too many words to explain.

So, if your company produces software in any sizable scale, I’d encourage you to at least give this blog the ten minutes it takes to read, even if you aren’t directly or even indirectly involved in the production of software.

What is Integration?

When we talk about integration, we are talking about moving data from one system to another and keeping each system synchronized. That is exactly what we do at Tasktop. It’s all about the flow of information between the constituents who drive the creative processes around software delivery. We help companies automate the flow of information between all of their tools that are used in the production of software, ensuring that the right information is at the right place at the right time.

When you think about how software is produced, especially in large companies, it generally involves some hair-brained idea from a manager (I am a manager, so I feel comfortable making this assertion), some business analysts who have to convert that idea into a semi-sensible set of requirements, a product/project manager who must convert those requirements into a project plan, developers who get the pleasure of struggling to make it a reality, quality assurance personnel who figure out where they screwed up, and operations who determine why it won’t scale.

Generally speaking, each constituent above uses their own tools, often times from different competitive vendors. The various disciplines are often separated geographically, commonly with cultural and language barriers. The vendors are usually not interested in effective integration, as each is competing for grabbing as much of the software lifecycle as possible. Even if the products are from one vendor, they often are not integrated with each other. Adding fuel to the blaze, culturally, the different disciplines of software do not always get along. It is no wonder that, despite all of the great advancements in each silo, software projects fail or are delayed 24-68 percent of the time. At Tasktop, we do integration, specifically the integration to make information between the five disciplines of software delivery (requirements, development, testing, deployment and project management) flow between the various tools that each discipline uses. Whether you call it Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) or Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), we are putting the “L” back into this business process of software delivery.

Why is Integration Important?

Why is moving data around between various systems something you should pay attention to? As we’ve been doing deployments of our Tasktop Sync integration solutions in enterprise situations over the past couple of years, we’ve learned that the data moving around is really just a proxy for the automation of the software delivery business process. As we kick off the deployments in our customers, we are often bringing the key representative stakeholders of the tools (e.g., QA and development) together for the first time to talk about not just their silo’d business processes, but more importantly, to talk about how the two (or more) disciplines should work together to build better software in a predictable and repeatable manner.

So what does this mean? The best way to think about this is by wondering what the world would look like when the software delivery process is not integrated. Over the past 15 years, we’ve seen each of the five disciplines focus internally as a silo. During those 15 years, each silo experienced tremendous innovations, such as Agile planning and development, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, functional programming languages, and test-driven development. The challenge was that as each of the silos optimized, the valleys between them grew ever deeper. Testers would often batch up all of the defects they discovered in a spreadsheet and share the defects every month or six weeks with the development team. Requirements were often not tied back to the activities that developers did and the tests that QA professionals ran, so a change to a requirement was often not caught. Reporting and analytics across the entire software delivery value chain was impossible without significant manual work. As more industries faced new regulations, increased reporting requirements, compliance from their stakeholders, and demands for more governance, the ramifications of not meeting these needs had real financial consequences. No matter what industry you are in, having an integrated software delivery chain will ensure higher software quality, faster cycle times for application development and delivery, and less rework.

Another reason why integration is so important is because it connects up different worlds. Over the past ten years, we’ve seen some pretty dramatic changes in the power of the individual. Whether it was populism driven by Apple devices being purchased by the individual and brought into the workplace, even though the individual had to pay for it out of their own pocket, or it was the freedom of inexpensive tools that an individual could easily purchase via a credit card (e.g., JIRA, Github or free e.g., open source ala Hudson/Jenkins, Git, Bugzilla, etc.), more and more software development had the inmates running the asylum. Even though Central IT groups or management had mandated the use of a particular tool stack or technology set, individuals were defying those mandates and going with the tools or devices that made them the most productive and effective in their jobs. So, one of the big problems that integration allows our customers to solve is to connect up the world of the individual, where the newest, coolest, most productive, least heavyweight usually wins the day, with the needs of the enterprise and what were viewed as heavyweight tools and technology that were trying to manage risk, gain visibility, ensure governance and compliance, and generally protect the organization. You can see one example of how Tasktop does this in the JIRA / QC webinar.

Hope to See You at SXSW or a Watering Hole Soon

Integration may not be sexy, but it’s now the main bottleneck that we as an industry have on scaling our collective ability to delivery software by 10x.

So if you see me out and about this weekend at SXSW, I am happy to talk about TechGirlz, or my kids, or Capital Factory, or DreamIt, or bootstrapping a business to 50+ people, or professional blackjack, but I hope you also ask me about integrating your software delivery stack. I promise I won’t scare you too much.

Well fortunately, there was no fiscal cliff (though the U.S. government did nothing more than my 4 year old son; it just kicked the can down the street) and somehow there was a day after even though the Mayan calendar just stopped. As such, I feel a little more comfortable writing a retrospective blog that is as much about the past as the future…

2012 was an eventful year for Tasktop. We kicked off 2012 celebrating our 5th anniversary. In this blog, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect less on Tasktop’s outwardly facing accomplishments that we highlighted in the press release and focus more on the behind the scenes aspects at Tasktop.

I truly believe that when we look back on 2012, it will be viewed as an inflection year for Tasktop.

Eclipse Mylyn and Tasktop Dev keep doing their thing. Driven by Android development and Asian programmers, Mylyn rode the wave of Eclipse adoption in 2012 and regularly sees 2+ million downloads per month. Tasktop Dev continues to make Eclipse and Visual Studio software programmers who use commercial tools (Mylyn is a great free choice if your development tool stack is open source) more productive.

2012 was the year that we validated Tasktop Sync as a viable solution for connecting the world of software delivery. Not only did we demonstrate the need for tools integration but also exposed how integration matters for process, collaboration and reporting. It’s been fascinating to learn how big a problem we have unearthed. With our Mylyn roots and our partner ecosystem, Tasktop is uniquely suited to address the challenges of tool heterogeneity which is ever-present and growing in the enterprise struggling to deliver high quality software in a timely manner.

As a bootstrapped company, we continued to grow steadily. We moved our corporate headquarters in Vancouver. We are thrilled about the new office because it allows us to create the team environment that is conducive to the innovation we are driving and the challenges we are trying to solve. We also opened an office in Austin, TX where our US headquarters are located and where many of our partners (CA, IBM, Micro Focus / Borland, Thoughtworks Studios, Smart Bear, etc.) and hopefully future partners (Planview, BMC, etc.) have a presence.

As we strive to do every year, we added some of the best and brightest young minds in the industry to our staff, and are proud to continue giving back to the educational system that has been so good to us as company through our active internship and co-op program. In addition, we added some grizzled veterans (I can’t say grey haired because some of them don’t have any hair) like Lance Knight, Dave West, Nicole Bryan and Jason Baldy. All of this has resulted in an organization that is inspired to solve a big problem, enjoys celebrating victories, has fun as a team, can be silly with each other, but has the organizational maturity to deliver high quality software for our customers and partners. At the end of the year, we added our 50th employee.

I am very proud of the work environment that we are creating at Tasktop. Its one thing to believe that we are balancing a fun place to work with the aspirations of a company trying to solve a really big problem; its even better when our staff and others in our community back that with recognitions such as BCBusiness Best Companies to Work for in BC and Technology Impact Award for Emerging Company of the Year.

We were also quite proud of our CEO and founder Mik Kersten who was named a finalist for the World Technology Award and a Business in Vancouver Forty under 40. We are thrilled that Mik is being recognized for his leadership and technical excellence.

We are excited about 2013 where you will see even more innovation and fun from Tasktop!

No, Mik is not joining politics nor has he started writing a book. Along with Paul Jacobs, David Kelley, Reid Hoffman, Ben Horowitz, Vinod Khosla, Neal Stephenson, Kara Swisher, Elon Musk, and approximately 90 others, he is a finalist in The World Technology Awards albeit in different categories.


When you look at the incredible names of this year’s finalists and past year’s winners and finalists, its an incredible list of who’s who. As a company, we take a great deal of pride that our CEO and co-founder, Mik Kersten, is a finalist and of course, we hope Mik wins. As a colleague, I am extremely gratified that Mik is being recognized. Mik has been an incredible evangelist and leader for Tasktop and for software professionals all over the world. In my mind, his management, leadership, and focus on company culture are some of the things that set Mik apart.

We are extremely thankful to the WTN in association with TIME, Fortune, CNN, Technology Review and Science/AAAS for recognizing Mik’s accomplishments to date with this honor.

The other esteemed finalists in the IT Software Individual category included:

• Bruce Donald – Professor of Computer Science, Duke University
• Sean Gourley – Chief Technology Officer, Quid
• Roger Jones – Co-Founder, Chairman, Chief Scientific Officer & Chief Operating Officer, Qforma
• Daniel Ratai – Founder, Leonar3Do

The World Technology Summit will be held in New York City on October 22 – 23 with the Awards Gala on the evening of the 23rd. Read the full press release or follow Mik.

At this year’s Agile ALM Connect sub-conference of EclipseCon 2012 Mik Kersten moderated a very lively analyst panel with a few of the leading analysts in ALM: Melinda Ballou of IDC, James Governor of RedMonk and Dave West (then at Forrester). Enjoy.

As someone who has lived in and around the Austin entrepreneurial scene for nearly the past decade, I am very excited about this announcement. In all the companies that I’ve managed while living in Austin from SolarMetric to SpringSource to Lexcycle, this is the first time a company I’ve been involved with had a real physical presence in Austin. I am thrilled about this. I feel like Austin has given me so much over the years but for whatever reason, I’ve generally been a solo flyer in Austin in all of my previous companies. At SolarMetric, we had one other person in Austin but with SpringSource and Lexcycle, I was the only one here. When I joined Vancouver-headquartered Tasktop on a day-to-day basis 2 years ago, most of my fellow ATXers rolled their eyes as I had yet again managed not to work for an Austin company.

As it turns out, Tasktop is different, and this announcement of our new office is evidence of that difference. I am excited to have launched the new office with a couple of fabulous women prominent in the local scene, Nicole Bryan and Melanie Wise. We plan to grow the office in coming months and years as we build out our business development, marketing, sales operations, solutions and the other areas of the company that I get to work with on a day-to-day basis.

Austin also has a little known Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) mafia with many of Tasktop’s partners who participate in the software value chain having a presence in Austin making Austin a perfect place for Tasktop’s US Headquarters.

Austin has been a big part of my growth as an entrepreneur, a businessman and a person. For those familiar with my time in Austin especially in the local tech start-up scene, I am grateful to:

		Brett for his timely and very important advice
		Josh letting me squat in his offices and including me in Capital Factory as mentor helping me re-engage in Austin
		Jonathan and our never-ending search for the ultimate breakfast taco
		Lisa being so supportive of Tasktop, helping us grow out our presence in Austin
		Kyle’s big heart and soul
		Mark and Greg and being able to reconnect

and so many more people that I apologize I am not mentioning.

One of the biggest influences on me during my nine years here in Austin has been Bijoy. I learned about Bootstrap Austin and met Bijoy right after we moved. Bijoy and I have debated and imbibed and debated. Those debates (is it really a debate when 1 person keeps being right?) have challenged me and caused me to assess and reassess. Although my crazy hair has come and gone, Bijoy and his hair have been one of the constants. I’m very proud of the fact that Tasktop is still bootstrapped since its founding in 2007, and I suspect that fact gives me a little cred with my friend who has gotten me to care far more about the journey than the destination.

My very first Bootstrap meeting was at the IC2 Institute in 2003 – I believe Dr. Darius spoke. If I am not mistaken, that is where I met Chad Jewell who 9 years later, helped us find our new office (even though I hadn’t spoken to the guy in at least 5 years). That’s Austin.

Also, I’d like to thank Lynn at Expero and look forward to spending time with her team in our shared location.

There is nothing like leaving a place to really appreciate it, and I had the fortune of doing so when we did our brief 1 year dalliance in Seattle. We made many good friends in Seattle but it probably wasn’t fair. Had I moved to Seattle from other places I’ve lived e.g., Boston or Morristown or Chicago, I may have fallen for Seattle. But unfortunately, my foil was the ATX and that is a tough act to follow.

And of course the family. Austin is home – its where Sharon and I decided to pitch our tent, its where my kids were born, and its where I plan on spending my twilight years wearing bad shirts and someday, even worse pants.

So, if you get a chance stop by and check us out.

Tasktop has a strong presence this week in Orlando, FL at IBM Innovate 2012, the main Rational Software Conference.

Tasktop CEO and father of Eclipse Mylyn Mik Kersten will be presenting the verbosely titled “LS-2323: Add Sync to Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration Link: Large-Scale Application Lifecycle Management Integration for IBM Rational Team Concert”. Look for a surprise customer guest to share their experiences using Tasktop Sync in Mik’s talk. The details of Mik’s talk follows below:

Date: Thu, Jun 7, 2012
Time: 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM
Location: Australia 2 – Dolphin

Additionally, Tasktop co-founder and OSLC working group member Robert Elves will be participating on the “LS-1653A: OSLC Experience Reports and Roundtable” panel.

Date: Wed, Jun 6, 2012
Time 1:45-2:45 PM
Location: Southern III – Dolphin

The company can be found during exhibit hours at the IBM Integration Center at pedestal #6 and also on the show floor at Booth #410. Stop by to chat, see a demo of Tasktop Sync and Tasktop Dev, and remember to have your badge scanned for a chance to win the 40″ Sony HDTV (Tasktop even pays for shipping).

I recently sat down with Dave West and Mik Kersten in Austin, TX in order to discuss the significance of Dave joining Tasktop. I think it comes across in the video but for me personally, one of the best things about Dave joining is that we are going to have a lot of fun while we transform the world.

Read more in Dave’s post, Mik’s post and my post on the topic.

As President & COO of Tasktop, I am thrilled to welcome Dave West to the Tasktop family.  Dave has been a friend of the company’s for a long time often staying up till all hours with Mik and I talking technology, ALM, agile, integrations, life, and making the world a better place to build software.  We’re especially excited about Dave joining because we believe it sends a strong signal to our customers, partners, and community.  Tasktop, first and foremost, is a product company with a mission that aligns neatly to Dave’s mission of helping people deliver software just a little bit better.  As the leading ALM analyst, Dave could have worked for his pick of companies and the fact that he chose Tasktop is a powerful statement about the stellar team we have built over the years. It also re-enforces the opportunity that we have a Tasktop to change the value stream of software delivery.  I’m proud of the company we’ve built that Dave chose us but also feel a responsibility to make Dave (and any Tasktopian for that matter) proud of their choice to be at Tasktop.
 
Dave has a unique vantage point on our customers’ challenges, hopes, desires and pain, and I look forward to watching  the evolution of our products as we incorporate that knowledge into Tasktop Sync, Tasktop Dev, and our future products.   Most of all, I am excited to be adding Dave’s voice to our stable of innovative technologists and thought leaders.  If you look at my history, I derive a great deal of personal satisfaction by working with some of the best technology companies and technologists in the world helping them get their innovations to customers who desperately need the value of those innovations.  It’ll be great to have Dave on board helping our marketing, sales, and business development groups on this front… to connect the existing and future Tasktop technologies to the customers who are in most need of them.

In what was my favorite Tasktop webinar to date, we received a number of insights from Tasktop CEO, Mik Kersten, and our featured speaker, Dave West, VP and Research Director at Forrester Research. This webinar on the future of ALM is titled “Getting ALM2.0+ to work: Breaking down the silos to provide an integrated value chain for software delivery and beyond“. This was our 16th webinar to date; if you missed any of our past webinars, they are available for viewing on the Webinars Page.

Ever since Tasktop started in 2007, we knew we were onto something that would transform application development and delivery. Mylyn, Tasktop Dev and Tasktop Sync have been delivering on that promise and we are very proud that our customers are seeing significant ROI with the use of our products. The webinar series has been a great channel for gathering external feedback that the benefit of the products that we are delivering for customers is very real. In last week’s webinar, we got further confirmation that the ALM integration problem we are solving for our customers is increasingly being acknowledged as a major pain point for the entire industry. In this screen capture from the webinar, Dave West highlighted that Forrester has uncovered integration as the largest roadblock for deploying ALM solutions. Features like the latest Agile planner are what gets talked about most, but integration is what’s needed to get the benefits of Agile deployments and the ROI of ALM modernization efforts.

There were numerous other insights that we gained through this webinar. I summarize a few of those insights below but encourage you to watch the webinar recording itself.

The modern software development world is marked by a desperate need to deliver software faster. There has been a fundamental shift in the cadence of software delivery driven by the proliferation of platforms, faster iterations and Agile development methodologies. In this new world order, innovation and speed has overtaken cost as the core measuring stick for software development organizations.

As Marc Andreessen wrote, “software is eating the world“. It is ubiquitous and growing ever more complex. The latest Mercedes Benz car comes with 20 million lines of code included. But if software is truly the differentiator, why is it always late, frequently unreliable, and usually of poor quality? Why do 30-70% of software projects fail?

The core premise is that many organizations haven’t kept up with the changing times. Software now comes from a variety of sources which creates dependencies to the broadening ecosystem. In the past, software managers ruled with an iron fist, controlling everything. In today’s world, control is a fallacy, and the best way to manage the ecosystem is with acceptance and visibility. However, today’s dev organizations don’t always have the discipline to be successful but instead go through the motions with what Dave refers to as “process pantomime”. The handoffs aren’t well defined, and developer chaos rules. In an interesting twist of fate, Agile is actually providing some of the discipline that has been so sorely lacking.

Dave further highlights that Agile has been the catalyst for a lot of the changes we’ve seen. Traditional ALM focused on traceability, workflow and reporting. All that made sense when you were only talking about 1-2 handoffs every 6-12 months, as outlined in the waterfall and other legacy methodologies. Today, ALM is characterized by lots of handoffs in the same time period and hence modern ALM is about augmenting the traditional view of ALM with automation, work planning and collaboration. Another issue that Dave raises is one that is near and dear to our hearts at Tasktop: he highlights the holistic view of a task that provides the context for effective collaboration linked to the work that needs to get done and linked to the steps in the software development and delivery process. Dave adds that seamless integration and ALM automation is critical for success in this Lean, Agile, fast iteration world which is exacerbated by disciplines that use completely different tools. This aligns perfectly with our mission at Tasktop as we spend a lot of our days striving to help companies through ALM Automation™ and Task Federation in order to practically ensure that the information from any one tool doesn’t stay stovepiped but rather is accessible by all constituents via the tools they already know and love.

Increasingly, getting all disciplines to work together by integrating the value stream is the key challenge. This is Tasktop’s primary focus, as we’ve learned that part of the battle is building tools to facilitate this challenge. We’ve also learned that in building these tools we’ve exposed the mess that arises during the collaboration between the siloed departments involved in software development and delivery. This has been exacerbated by the fact that the stacks of tools in each silo have been changing rapidly. In many organizations, ALM architecture is lacking and no one is responsible for the holistic process and cross-departmental workflows. At Tasktop, we’ve augmented the Tasktop Sync solution with Sync Studio to provide visual and monitoring tools to address the mess that we saw.

The entire process of developing and delivering software is disconnected and lacks visibility and traceability. The historical attempts at integration are manual or broken, and things are getting worse as the lifecycle is getting more complex. Despite all of the challenges, we are starting to see some best practices such as having an ALM Architect on staff who is responsible for the entire software value chain (this sounds like a topic for a future blog). We are also seeing some patterns emerge on how to deal with the chaos more effectively:

• Pattern 1: Defect Unification
• Pattern 2: Planning Visibility
• Pattern 3: Requirements Traceability

In conclusion, I really want to encourage you to watch this webinar recording. In addition to the details of the patterns, there’s a ton more fodder in the webinar that I don’t even mention in this already too long summary blog, including interesting stats on usage of ALM components, introduction to flow-based ALM, a discussion on batches and reducing batch sizes, and devOps place.

Finally, congrats to Don B of NC for attending the recent Tasktop webinar “Getting ALM2.0+ to work: Breaking down the silos to provide an integrated value chain for software delivery and beyond” and winning the iPad. Don’s name was randomly selected from the list of attendees of the webinar.

If you want to learn more about Tasktop Sync, the Ovum Technology Audit for Tasktop Sync provides another independent view point. You can also visit the Tasktop Sync page for more info or to request a demo.