Tasktop

As I’ve been putting together materials for my upcoming webinar, I’ve been trying to figure out … What is the single most important thing we’ve learned thus far while “drinking our own champagne”? There have been so many lessons learned.. But what would I say is the single most important thing? Very simply, the most important lesson learned is choice. Give people choice and you will have teams that flourish. That is what we experienced in phase 1 of our journey, and we have continued to see that in phase 2 of our journey.

Our partnership with IBM forced us to re-think team collaboration from the perspective of inter-organization communication while we were implementing an outsourced testing model. We know many of our customers are attempting the same model — but how do you accommodate different tools, different processes and different styles of communication inherent in different companies? That’s where Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) principles come into play. SLI allows for choice — choice of tool which allows for choice of process which results in better communication and collaboration. And happy teams.

But it is not without its challenges. The greatest challenge we faced in our second phase was the recognition that when data is being shared across companies, you have to be careful about what and how you share that data. Confidentiality responsibilities became front and center as we figured out our SLI strategy for the outsourced testing integration pattern. Come join me for part 2 of our series on “Drinking Our Own Champagne” and learn how we overcame these challenges — and proved again the fact that choice results in flourishing teams and great products!

When we think of Mission Impossible, some of us think of Peter Graves and Barbara Bain whereas others think of Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames. The beauty of the Mission Impossible TV series was that it was predictable… you had the awesome self-destructing tape scene, followed by the dossier scene, followed by the preparations and then finally the actual plan in progress. Things were predictable, straight-forward and generally everyone knew the role they’d be playing. Enter the modern movie series with a variety of directors where some elements of the classic TV show remained e.g., the self-destructing device. However, unlike the TV series, the movies rarely followed a predictable script but rather often had twists, turns and surprises.

Software development too has followed this path from the predictable and consistent to our modern day reality filled with surprises and complexity, making it harder and harder to keep all the characters in the cast happy.

In this blog, I’ll go through a real life Mission Impossible of the modern software development kind: make PM, Eng and the business all happy simultaneously.

Should you choose to accept this mission, you must satisfy the following:

	Don’t interrupt the flow of business
	Don’t force people to use a new process
	Don’t force people to use new tools unless they actually want to

Unlike Hollywood, you don’t get an unlimited number of cool gagdets at your disposal to actually meet this goal such as hovercrafts, hidden cameras, tuxedo computers, or latex masks. Rather, if you are, in fact, crazy enough to accept the mission…. I give you only one tool to accomplish your mission: an integration tool. That is all. As always, should you or any member of your IM Force team be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This tape will self-destruct in 5 seconds. Good luck.

Turns out, that single tool may be the only tool that has any hope of being able to satisfy the age old conundrum that has plagued software development: “let me work how I want to, and magically everyone else will be happy.” Normally, pleasing one constituent generally results in a lot of unhappiness and diva-like behavior.

By the way – this is a true story – Tasktop’s true story over the last few months… the story I’ve been living.

Let me start from the beginning. Our developers have been humming along using Bugzilla for years to manage stories, bugs and tasks. They love it. It makes them smile. Problem is, for me as a product manager, Bugzilla simply doesn’t provide the planning capabilities I need – it wasn’t built to do that. So we spent a good chunk of time discussing moving to a different tool entirely. (But wait… our mission requires that we satisfy those three requirements – moving to an entirely new tool would likely break each one of those… so now what?)

In the course of our conversations it became evident that the way to truly solve our respective needs was to have fluidity and dynamic freedom in our product development and ensure we had a planning tool that was separate from the execution tool. Using the integration tool, we would automatically sync them to each other, to ensure planning and execution were in no way disconnected, all the while, solving the three requirements above. Perfect.

Mission Impossible: Accomplished.

We did accomplish the mission but as it turns out there was more to the mission requiring a sequel / another season. Ironically, we have actually benefited more in an unforeseen way. In the course of configuring and setting up our integration, it was the driving factor for us to have spirited conversations, forcing collaboration across the functional boundaries of PM, Dev and Test. In the end, we embarked on a variety of process improvements that *everyone* was bought into and also improved our business flows between the groups. Although we set out to accomplish one mission, we actually realized that we accomplished more than one mission! Thus, making PM, Engineering and the business all happy simultaneously. See below for a “happy Leo” (one of our developers):

Stay tuned for what we learn next as we roll out the next phase of our integration strategy here at Tasktop.

This week produced a series of subtle hints that remind me why I truly enjoy being a woman in the technology industry, especially at Tasktop. We arranged a “Ladies of Tasktop” evening out. As we were devoured our fabulous chocolate desserts, we started to dig into a host of possible product ideas – and what caught all of our attention was that many of our ideas revolved around facilitating more visual interactions with the technologies we use in our day to day jobs.

We had a great time bantering back and forth about our opinions on why women (at least this group of women) seem to respond more naturally to visualizations and put greater emphasis on user interface in general.

Subtle Hint #1: Women often approach technology differently and the “ladies of Tasktop” have a great opportunity to influence next generation ALM interaction models.

The night before our dinner, I went to the Eclipse Demo Camp along with five of my fellow female Tasktopians. We saw great demos of new Eclipse technology but that is not what struck me since there are always cool demos at Demo Camp! What struck me was that multiple people mentioned how great it was that so many women worked at Tasktop – both in engineering and otherwise.

Subtle Hint #2: Tasktop has actively strived to create a culture and environment that values women throughout the organization. I am lucky to be a part of a company that values diversity and all sorts of different perspectives.

But I am not alone in my observations concerning the value and importance of women and the challenges and opportunities that they face. I recommend that you read the incredibly insightful and thought provoking Atlantic Monthly article Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, by Anne-Marie Slaughter. As I started considering the article in the context of this week, another realization struck me…

Subtle Hint #3: Having it all is largely dependent on your definition of “all” – At Tasktop, I am surrounded by an incredibly bright, innovative group of women – in a field that desperately needs more women to influence the future of our industry. And I have an amazing husband and two incredible kids at home. I think I have it “all”.

While I may not always feel at home as a woman in this predominantly male field, there are times that I feel quite lucky to have fallen into this field. This week was one of those weeks.

All too often I sat in meetings discussing integrations. Which ones next? How best to maintain existing ones? Which ones were most important?

Was this at Tasktop? No… it was when I was a product manager for an Agile/ALM Vendor. And, as a product manager, these conversations were always the most depressing. Why? Because – we needed to be delivering features that would improve developers lives, not backend plumbing. Our customers wanted things like improved backlog management, better reporting on defect rates and cycle time, more automated testing capabilities. But there were always other tools in place that our product needed to interface with, and so for us to improve our bit of the software value stream, we had to integrate with all these other tools. This meant significant effort was dedicated to integrations which took up too much of our time and, frankly, from an Agile/ALM vendor’s point of view, is a lot more boring than delivering the next cool Scrum team board features!

Now… here is what is interesting and, in the ultimate irony, proves why Tasktop’s participation in the software delivery value stream is so critical…

As a product manager at Tasktop, I now have the same conversations about integrations. But they are not depressing – they are invigorating because it is the heartbeat of how we can help our customers and partners. What is the irony? What we need at Tasktop to efficiently deliver integrations – great backlog management, automated testing, and visibility into our processes — are precisely the features that Tasktop’s various partners, the Agile/ALM vendors, can provide us – if they only have the time to focus on their feature set rather than integrations!

My new perspective, as part of the Tasktop team, is to free our vendor partners from worrying about integrations between tools so that they can concentrate on delivering great new features around Agile and ALM – and what once depressed me, now invigorates me each day!

Thursday was my first experience as a Tasktop employee… and it was certainly not a typical “first day”! Neelan Choksi invited me to the third annual SXSW Startup Crawl .

When I got in the car with Neelan I heard lots of clanging about — what was it? The wine for our booth. Ok… things are looking up! When we got there, the energy level was intense – on the dot of 4pm we were immediately swarmed with the beginnings of over 3900 attendees.

It was pretty impressive to hear the shear enthusiasm of each person as they said … “I work at a social media blah blah blah blah blah”. Every person’s eyes said “I am hungry, I love what I do and I am going to make it.” A great vibe.

But why was our booth so popular? Neelan and I weren’t spewing anything about social media! Tasktop doesn’t make movies and we aren’t struggling musicians looking to “make it” at SXSW. And then it dawned on me…. we were the only booth with wine instead of beer! I went about serving wine happily for another 3 hours and went home feeling good about my first Tasktop experience.

But then I woke up with a different thought… as I poured each glass of wine, I would explain how Tasktop helps people deliver better software. As soon as I would say something about how many development shops are disconnected from business analysts and QA and using lots of different tools that don’t talk to each other – the immediate reaction? Vigorous nodding of heads with some rolling of eyes and a “oh my, we feel that all the time.” One Wall St guy in from NY said “I’m on the business side but I know my head of development feels this pain daily cuz I hear about it from him all the time!” Interestingly, even the small shops that we talked to were feeling the pain — guys with 5 developers were looking for ways to keep the devs in their IDEs but still connected to the Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC). It felt really good to realize that even at an event that wasn’t a typical software development event, people clearly feel the pain that Tasktop focuses on alleviating.

Ok, so for the guy who came back multiple times for wine from Australia who owns a nightclub? Or the woman who came back asking for more recommendations for Texas vineyards to visit while she was in town? Yep, for them it was likely just for the wine. But for many of the others the pain that Tasktop aims to alleviate resonated – and that is a great feeling as a brand new employee!