Tasktop

We’re pleased to join HP in announcing that customers of HP ALM 11 will now be able to take advantage of many of the features of Tasktop Dev through an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) version created for HP ALM 11. Most notably, by connecting developers using their tools of choice to the application lifecycle, this new OEM version of Tasktop Dev is now an integral part of the HP Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI) suite. Leveraging the Tasktop Dev OEM extensions, ALI aggregates task-based information from multiple development tools to provide complete traceability from requirement, defect and user story tasks to code changes managed with leading source code management (SCM) tools. In other words, developers get all the benefits of Tasktop Dev and Eclipse Mylyn for this enterprise ALM tool, while testers, business analysts and other lifecycle stakeholders are able to work more efficiently since collaboration with development is captured and connected.

Welcome Tutorial

The OEM version of Tasktop Dev is available from HP in HP ALM 11 now as part of the recently announced ALI 2.5 and includes the following key components:

		Eclipse IDE integration – HP ALM 11 customers can now access HP ALM artifacts directly from within Eclipse. Also bundled with the OEM are: the Subversion (SVN) Eclipse Mylyn Connector for Subclipse and Subversive, Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) Eclipse Mylyn Connector, and the Eclipse Mylyn Connector for Hudson/Jenkins. This allows Linux and Mac users to access and update application defects and requirements from HP ALM 11.
		Visual Studio IDE integration – HP ALM 11 customers can now access HP ALM artifacts directly from within Microsoft Visual Studio. This results in more productive developers who remain in the flow longer because they have access to the information they need at their fingertips when they need it. HP ALM Visual Studio Integration
		Workspace auto-provisioning – New Tasktop Workspace Provisioning technology allows developers to auto-provision development environments comprised of IDEs, SCM and build management systems to automate many of the time-consuming and administrative tasks that erode developer productivity.
		HP Agile Accelerator task board for Eclipse – Tasktop’s developer-centric Agile Planning board provides developers with an Eclipse IDE interface for accessing and updating HP Agile Accelerator plans. The planner includes an Agile task board that provides a visual and developer-centric representation of project progress. This provides developers with improved visibility into team sprint status while making it easy for developers to keep plans up-to-date without leaving their home environment, the IDE.
		SCM traceability automation for HP ALI – By tracking development activity, Tasktop automates traceability between the source code committed to repositories such as Subversion, and the corresponding defects and requirements that are identified and tracked in HP ALM 11. The new HP ALI 2.5 solution is a key component of HP ALM 11, which provides enterprises with the real-time visibility and traceability between HP ALM and open source SCM systems. For developers, the task to change traceability information is navigable directly within the Eclipse development environment. Other stakeholders can view the code associated with a given requirement or defect from the HP ALI reports interface in HP ALM.

In addition to the components above, which are already available today, we’re working on a forthcoming update that will also include an HP-branded version of Tasktop’s welcome tutorial screen. This provides quick access to key features and content for getting started with the IDE integrations. The screenshot above provides a sneak peak at how this will look. We will continue working with HP to provide HP ALM customers with additional functionality and usability as part of this OEM.

HP Agile Accelerator task board for Eclipse

Automatic Workspace Provisioning

For all HP Quality Center users, previous HP ALM users (version 10), and users of HP ALM 11 looking for any of the 60+ additional commercial and open source connectors not included in the OEM, Tasktop Dev Enterprise Edition offers all of the above functionality as well as integrations with other vendors’ ALM tools for $199 per user per year.

For customers looking for high quality synchronization or linking capabilities, the Tasktop Sync product line offers a server solution that provides all of the other constituents in the software value chain, from project managers to testers, with the information they need in their tool of choice regardless of where the information originates.

Tasktop has developed a strong relationship with the HP ALM team and we’ve been working closely with HP R&D and product management to deliver products that augment HP ALM with Tasktop’s developer-centric capabilities. We are pleased to have received a Partner of the Year award in recognition of the cross-company collaboration that led to this product, and look forward to bringing more of our innovations to HP users.

Contact us for more information on Tasktop Sync, Tasktop Dev, or the HP OEM version of Tasktop Dev.

Tasktop will be participating in the ATX Startup Crawl at SXSW later today, March 8. With over 2000 RSVPs already, we are looking forward to meeting with all the talented folks from Austin, those visiting Austin for SXSW as well as the 50 fellow Austin companies that are participating in the Crawl. We will be manning the Tasktop table at the Capital Factory location at the Omni building at 701 Brazos St., 8th Floor from 4pm – 10pm.

You can meet Tasktop’s newest employee, Nicole (who technically won’t start until March 19) as well as me at the Crawl. We’re looking forward to hanging out, drinking some wine, seeing old friends and making new ones. We can chat about how it’s like to work for a company located in two of the greatest places in the world (Vancouver and Austin) or Eclipse or Mylyn or Tasktop Sync or application lifecycle management or any number of other interesting topics. So stop by, we’d love to meet you.

We are hiring in Austin so we are also looking forward to starting dialogues with people who could eventually fill some job opportunities that Tasktop either has currently or will shortly have in our Austin location:

• Marketing Manager
• Partner Relations and Business Development Manager
• Sales Operations Manager

If you can’t make the crawl, contact us as we’ll also be out and about during SXSWi attending sessions as well as a party or two.

By the way, we are also looking for office space near Tarrytown / west downtown so if you have any leads on Austin office space, let us know…

Ovum Technology Audit of Tasktop Sync, Version 2.0 Author: Michael Azoff, Principal Analyst, Software – IT Solutions Date: February 2012

For a limited time, we’re excited to make available to our customers and users the Ovum Technology Audit for Tasktop Sync (registration required). Technology Audits are independent product reviews done by Ovum analysts.

Recently named as a Power100, Michael Azoff handled this Technology Audit. Azoff focuses on Agile practices, DevOps, and software development lifecycle management (SDLM) especially when related to the cloud. I feel like I’ve been briefing Michael for half a decade through a couple of different companies. Michael definitely gets our partners’ businesses, and I am glad that he evaluated Tasktop Sync.

You might be wondering “why should I read another piece of marketing from Tasktop?” The main reason is that this is not pure Tasktop marketing but rather a proper analyst report.

A lot of folks don’t know how analyst Technology Assessments (TA) work so I thought I would share the process by which we were able to make this TA available. We went through a stringent process with Ovum… extensive written questionnaires followed by verbal interviews. At the end of the effort, we were given a chance to review a draft of the TA to ensure that the facts were correct, and then Ovum published the TA making it available to its research customers. We felt that the TA gave a fair and accurate representation of Tasktop Sync as well as some great insight on what types of companies would be most successful using Tasktop Sync so we decided to go ahead and distribute the TA for a few months.

We are hopeful that you will find this content compelling. In particular, the TA highlights some deployment scenarios and how Sync customers are using Tasktop Sync to connect their software development lifecycle. Additionally, the TA also goes on to talk about some areas of strategic growth for Tasktop Sync… we’ve been getting increasing requests from customers for integrations and synchronization with Product Portfolio Management (PPM) tools and Helpdesk / ITSM tools.

After reading the Ovum Technology Audit, if you have any questions do not hesitate to contact us.

We recently put out a year in review press release. I thought it would be fun to put together a top 10 list of my favorite accomplishments from this year.

1. People love working for Tasktop as evidenced by us being named the 2011 Best Employer in BC and named BC Business Magazine’s #4th best company to work for in BC in the Digital Tech & Services Category 2011
2. The introduction of Tasktop Sync extending Tasktop’s integration capabilities beyond the developer to other constituents in the software development process including testers, managers, and business analysts
3. Open source leadership with active participation in the Eclipse Foundation including: continued leadership of Mylyn and the promotion of Mylyn to a top-level Eclipse project, mentor of Hudson and Lyo (OSLC SDK project) in Eclipse, participation in various Eclipse DemoCamps, Eclipse Island in CeBIT, Eclipsecon, etc., active contributor to nearly two dozen open source projects
4. Four Tasktop Dev product releases
5. Expansion of the Tasktop partner ecosystem with new connectors for Accept360, Polarion, Borland StarTeam, and SmartBear CodeCollaborator
6. Task Focused Continuous Integration via a new connector for Hudson and Jenkins
7. Cross-repository Agile Planning with Eclipse IDE integration and offline support
8. Tasktop Dev for Visual Studio extends the capabilities historically available to Eclipse users to .NET users as well
9. Mik Kersten’s 2011 Top 10 Prediction Series was incredibly popular, and we also discovered that Mik considers writing a guilty pleasure. Mik also introduced ALM Automation during his keynote at JAX
10. Recognition for our efforts as we were awarded the 2011 AllianceONE Partner of the Year Award from HP – Innovative Partner and were named a finalist as the Most Innovative Java Company at the JAX Innovation Awards 2011

We want to thank you for supporting Tasktop in 2011, and look forward to an even more active 2012.

Meet Tasktop at JavaOne at Booth #5004. Tasktop team members will be happy to show you the latest from Tasktop including Tasktop Sync, Tasktop Dev and Eclipse Mylyn.

Also, if you have some time, Tasktop and GitHub are co-hosting a Drinkup on Tuesday night starting at 8pm at Jasper’s Corner Tap. Jasper’s Corner Tap is located at 401 Taylor St. We hope to see you there.

Monday’s Panel: The Future of Java Build and Continuous Integration

• Ted Farrell, Chief Architect, Tools & Middleware
• Mik Kersten, CEO, Tasktop, @mik_kersten
• Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation, @mmilinkov
• Mike Maciag, CEO Electric Cloud
• Max Spring, Tech Lead, Cisco Systems

from Mik's JavaOne talk

We saw a great turn out at the panel, with attendees driving a discussion of how Hudson and Continuous Integration in general is becoming a central part of the modern ALM stack. Tomorrow (Tuesday October 4th), Mik will elaborate on the story in his talk titled “ALM Automation with Mylyn and Hudson”.

Tuesday’s Talk: ALM Automation with Mylyn and Hudson

Date: Tues., Oct. 4, 2011, noon – 1 p.m. Pacific
Location: Parc 55 – Divisidero

With the shift to PaaS and a new breed of open source ALM tools, the deployment loop of enterprise apps is going through its biggest transition since the creation of Java. Kersten will explore connecting the enterprise Java stack to cloud deployment via task-focused continuous integration based on Hudson. Distributed version control systems, code review and Agile planning, based on the Eclipse Mylyn interoperability platform, can be used to create a new level of connectivity and automation between the team and the running application. This talk outlines a roadmap for transforming productivity by connecting developers’ desktops to the release, and automating all the steps in between, from provisioning the IDE to monitoring the running application.

We’re especially appreciative when members of our community are out there evangelizing the technologies we develop here at Tasktop. Mike Henke has been one our most ardent fans, and happily, he is again at it. Mike will be at d2w, the designer developer workflow conference in Kansas City July 14 – 16. Mike will be presenting “A Task-Oriented Workflow With Mylyn and Eclipse” on July 15 from 9:45 – 10:40.

From the d2w conference website, the presentation abstract is:

Mylyn’s task-focused interface reduces information overload and makes multitasking easy. Mylyn makes task a first class part of the Eclipse IDE and monitors your programming activity to create a “task context” that focuses your workspace. This puts the information you need at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing information overload, facilitating multitasking and easing the sharing of expertise.

If you are in the Kansas City area, you should attend d2w and catch Mike’s presentation.

Tasktop Technologies has been named a finalist for the JAX Innovation Awards 2011 in the category of Most Innovative Java Company. We now need your help. The final step to being named a winner is a community vote. If you enjoy Mylyn or Tasktop, please vote for us at http://vote.jax-awards.com/.

Per the JAX Awards website, the criteria for the Most Innovative Java Company:

This is awarded to the most innovative company that:
- is characterised by ingenuity and a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities of the Java Ecosystem.
- demonstrates an inventive business model based on Java technologies.
- leverages the potential commercial value of the Java platform in an original and inspiring way.

We’d like to thank the JAX organizers and the JAX Innovation Award Jury for naming us a finalist for this award. It is a tremendous honor to have made it this far.

Tasktop will be a Gold Sponsor of the JAX developer conference being held May 2 – May 6 in Mainz, Germany. Feel free to stop by the Tasktop booth to see a demo of the latest and greatest on Tasktop and the Eclipse Mylyn project. Additionally, Tasktop personnel will be doing a number of presentations at the conference. Specifically, Tasktop’s CEO and father of Mylyn, Mik Kersten, will be giving a conference keynote on May 3 at 8:15 PM.

Other talks include:

• May 3 11:45 – 12:45 Git, Gerrit, Hudson and one Mylyn to rule them all by Tasktop’s Steffen Pingel and Tasktop’s Benjamin Muskalla
• May 4 17:30 – 18:30 Q&A: State of Continuous Integration Panel by Kersten, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Steffen Schluff, and Björn Feustel
• May 5 14:00 – 15:00 Mylyn 3.6: Agile, ALM and task-focused Continuous Integration by Kersten

We look forward to seeing you in Germany next.

I am excited to be part of a panel on Entrepreneurship: challenges and opportunities organized by the MIT Alumni Club and the MIT Enterprise Forum on Thursday, March 31 at Dell’s Campus in Round Rock. I look forward to hearing from my fellow panelists about their experiences with starting up companies.

The other panelists include:

• David Shoemaker – VP Engineering & Operations Alereon, Inc.
• Marc Yagjian – Managing Director at Origin Partners
• Mark Jansen – Managing Director at Holland Park Capital

The panel will be moderated by Kevin Przybocki, the co-founder of Anue Systems, Inc, a leader in network visibility solutions.

Several Tasktopians will be speaking at EclipseCon 2011 in Santa Clara, CA March 21 – 24. As well, there will be several additional sessions on Mylyn. If you are attending Eclipsecon, please do stop by and say hello:

Monday, March 21 13:30 – 13:50 in Stevens Creek
Tired of CVS? Pimp your productivity with Git, Gerrit, Hudson and Mylyn
by Tasktop’s Benjamin Muskalla and Tasktop’s Steffen Pingel

Tuesday, March 22 10:40 – 11:00 in Stevens Creek
Case Study: Shipping Mylyn Reviews for Software Development in Air Traffic Management
by Mylyn Review lead Mario Bernhart as well as Stefan Reiterer and Killian Matt

Tuesday, March 22 11:10 – 11:30 in Stevens Creek
Mylyn meets Intent : Documentation made fun and useful
by Cedric Brun

Tuesday, March 22 14:00 – 14:20 in Ballroom BC
The Mylyn Reloaded
by Tasktop’s CEO Mik Kersten (and Chris Aniszczyk and Wayne Beaton)

Tuesday, March 22 14:30 – 15:10 in Ballroom D
The Business of Selling Free Software
by Tasktop’s President Neelan Choksi

Tuesday, March 22 19:30 – 20:30 in Camino Real
Mylyn – Application Lifecycle Tools BoF
with Tasktop’s Kersten, Pingel, Muskalla, and Choksi

If you are going to at EclipseCon 2011 in Santa Clara, CA, contact us to set up some time to meet.