Tasktop

Disjointed tools have inundated the application lifecycle. At its roots, tool diversity is a good thing. Over the past few years, it has transformed the way software is built via Agile methods, open source tools and differentiating vendors. But it has also wreaked havoc on the decade-old promise of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). We need a new kind of infrastructure to deliver on that promise in a world where developers get to choose the tools that make them most productive. The time has come for an integrated lifecycle bus that allows information to flow freely between developers, testers, business analysts and administrators. This infrastructure will enable us to connect the best offerings in ALM in order to create a Lean Software Lifecycle, and implement a build-measure-learn loop that connects business idea to app store, and back again. We need a set of common data models and architectural patterns. Most importantly, we need to establish the common artifact that will connect the lifecycle. We are calling the category of infrastructure that will enable this Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI).

When outlined on a whiteboard or diagram, the architecture of today’s ALM stack resembles a half-eaten bowl of spaghetti, with meatballs corresponding to the various tools selected by stakeholders. We have two choices, either find a way back to the homogenous and single vendor solution of the 1990s, or embrace heterogeneity and come up with an infrastructure that provides end-to-end collaboration and traceability across best-of-breed tools.

Not long ago, we witnessed a similar transformation of the app dev stack. Once the services, databases and app server space enabled heterogeneity, the middleware category materialized and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) emerged, along with the new title of “Enterprise Architect”. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. It’s now time to create the role of the Lifecycle Architect, and to define an architectural framework for connecting the software lifecycle. Just as the notion of services was key to enabling the ESB, and file and documents abstractions were to sharing data, we now need an abstraction to connect the software lifecycle and to create a Software Lifecycle Bus. That abstraction is the social task.

Today Tasktop is a kicking off an effort to bootstrap the SLI discipline, with a series of whitepapers discussing the technical architecture, common data model, and technical tools. We are proposing the Eclipse Mylyn m4 open source project as a home for collaborating on a de facto implementation of the SLI data model, which will leverage what has been learned from the adoption of Mylyn, integrations that build on it, and new efforts around the open standards of Linked Data and OSLC. Later this week we are also launching an SLI integration patterns catalog, based on existing input from our customers, and open for all to contribute to. By the end of the week, with input from key thought leaders present at the ALM Connect subconference of EclipseCon, we plan to release a first draft of the SLI manifesto. To learn more and to participate, see:

	Whitepaper: Building the Business Case for Software Lifecycle Integration
	Whitepaper: Software Lifecycle Integration Architecture
	Software Lifecycle Integration landing page
	Eclipse Mylyn m4 Project Proposal Draft
	SLI Patterns Catalog Wiki (to come)

Learn more about SLI

For the second year in a row, Tasktop has been named to British Columbia’s Ready to Rocket list.  This exclusive group is made up of 25 privately-owned companies in the technology and communications sectorwho are positioned for high growth in 2013.  A hundred semi-finalists are selected by Rocket Builders through open nominations, and from this hundred, only 25 are chosen to be a part of the final list. Lucky for us, Tasktop was deemed worthy.  As Reg Nordman, Managing Partner at Rocket Builders, said, “Each year when we choose the Ready to Rocket companies, we are looking for those companies that have best matched technical innovation with market opportunity. Tasktop Technologies is an excellent example of the right technology for the right customers at the right time.”

For us at Tasktop, being named to the Ready to Rocket list for the second time highlights the sustained opportunity we have in front of us and reinforces our excitement for what is to come in 2013.  It’s so fulfilling to see that outside groups have just much faith in our success as we do, and we’d like to thank the selection committee at Rocket Builders for acknowledging us.  As a bootstrapped business, we are proud of what we’ve accomplished so far; we experienced a 250 percent growth in 2012 with the help of our 50+ staff across two continents, and being recognized by Rocket Builders makes all our hard work even more worthwhile.  Tasktop is certainly “Ready to Rocket,” and we have great expectations for our continuing growth in the coming year.

Tasktop is always looking to add the best and brightest to our team, so contact us if you’re interested in joining a company that’s passionate about connecting the world of software.

Having just returned from the fantastic ALM Summit in Redmond it is even clearer to me that there is a lot to talk about when discussing ALM. The event in Redmond is focused on the Microsoft platform, but the discussions were far broader. Technology impacts such as cloud, mobile and open source coupled with process changes driven by Agile and Lean Startup mean the very fabric of ALM is changing. The announcement of TFS and GIT working in perfect harmony is illustrative of this shift. But even after 3 busy days there is still lots to talk about, which brings me to the ALM Connect, an event that myself, the Eclipse foundation and a team of great people have been working on. The event, which is scheduled for March 25th through 28th in Boston MA has all the ingredients for an amazing conference.

Deep Dive Into Content

All the sessions in the program are great, but I would like to draw your attention to a few that caught my eye during the call for papers.

• Moving towards ALM 3.0 by Forrester Analyst Jeffrey Hammond. Not only is Jeffrey a great speaker, but always fills his presentation with lots of data that you can use back in the office. In this talk Jeffery is highlighting the major shifts in the fabric of ALM. Looking at the data this talk is based on we might see a redefinition of the ALM category, which is very exciting!
• What ALM knowledge you can expect from CS graduates by Gary Pollice, professor at WPI. The emerging skills crisis in software engineering is going to affect us all so I am excited to hear how you can better hire CS graduates and make them more productive. This talk also helps to remind us that ALM is more than just tools, but includes processes and people.
• Continuous Integration at Google Scale by John Micco, Google. CI has emerged as the lifeblood of modern software delivery, and on paper seems easy, but for the majority of large organizations with complex builds, heavy dependencies and nasty test environments building a workable CI environment is difficult. In this talk John describes how a very complex CI environment can be built and maintained in a very changeable business.
• Building Mylyn 4.0 by Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop. Mylyn has defined how Eclipse developers interface with systems of record such as bug trackers and project manager tools, but the underlying model has not changed for over 5 years. Mik is going to describe what needs to change to get Mylyn ready for next generation ALM.

Bring your boss to ALM Connect Executive Event

ALM Connect will provide a rich set of ideas for practitioners to take back to their teams, but without management support many of those ideas will never be implemented.

Above: EclipseCon 2012 ALM Panel with Mik Kersten, Dave West, Melinda Ballou and James Governor

Solving this problem was the motivation of running an Executive event on Wednesday the 27th of March. This event is aimed at decision makers and is by invitation only.

Content highlights include:

• Twitter and Github kick off the event talking about the future of ALM and how the next generation of software development is being undertaken. These presentations will show how you can marry innovation, rapid delivery and complex development teams into an Agile delivery capability.
• ALM in action case studies. Still working on the fine print, but we will have two high profile companies who are going to present their experience with ALM and how they are using ALM to form a competitive advantage. These sessions are aimed at telling all the dirty secrets of ALM, the motivation for adopting ALM and the reality of ALM in their companies.
• The user is the center: Apps in the world of engagement by Lee Nackman from HP. Lee has been involved in ALM for many years and was one of the executives responsible for IBMs involvement with Eclipse. In this talk Lee will describe how systems of engagement have changed the face of ALM and how that is only to get worse. I expect some sneak previews of the HP’s future ALM strategy in this talk.
• Agile 2.0 software development in the era of the social graph by Israel Gat Fellow at the Cutter Consortium. Israel a leading management light on ALM and the economics of software delivery will describe the social side of development. Describing how social graphs and other mechanisms can be used to better manage and enable software delivery.
• Scrum – Success ends with middle management by Ken Schwaber co-creator of Scrum. Having Ken, one of the drivers of the Agile movement at the event will add a level of Agile pragmatism to the proceedings. In this talk Ken will present the audience with framework for taking Agile to the next level, but be warned this path is not for the faint of heart.
• The future of ALM panel – This session includes Sam Guckenheimer from MS, Lee Nackman, Jeffrey Hammond and Mik Kersten on what the future of ALM looks like and how it will affect the audience. I will moderate, so expect an exciting and thought provoking session.

If you are interested in attending the executive day, or have boss who is interested then please let us know. You may also wish to view the Executive Day landing page, or the event announcement from the Eclipse Foundation for a detailed agenda. I can promise the event will be exciting, thought provoking and inspiring. It is rare to get so many leaders on ALM in one room and at one event.

January 17th marks the 6th anniversary of Tasktop’s inception, and has given me an opportunity to think about the past 6 years, and the next. All technological revolutions require a new kind of infrastructure. This decade will mark the shift to the software economy, with traditional companies turning into software delivery organizations. The problem is that, outside of ISVs who have glued together their own ALM processes, we’re not all that efficient at building software.

The generation before ours mastered building cars, managing just-in-time inventories of parts, as well as complex supply chains. And yet we’re still seeing software collaboration across companies and departments being done via spreadsheets and email threads, today’s equivalent of carrier pigeons. While the rest of the ALM industry sorts out the new generation of systems of engagement to make developers, Agile project managers and other stakeholders happy, Tasktop’s mission is to create the infrastructure that glues together this new breed of tools, with tasks as the new currency of planning and collaboration.

When staring out the window at our new Vancouver HQ, I often fixate on the orchestrated flow of cargo ships routing containers–the abstraction that has come to define the shipping industry. Rob Elves, co-founder of Tasktop, joins me in the picture below, as we were reflecting on our journey of the past six years. We validated the need for a layer of infrastructure between the developer and the various ALM servers by shoehorning it into the Eclipse desktop client and giving it a single and collaborative UI called Mylyn. That paved the way for our first commercial product, called Tasktop Dev, whose success was not just in laying our commercial foundation and revenues that drove our growth, but in allowing us to learn what a mess software development outside of the IDE really is. In our mission to connect the world of software delivery, the next step became overwhelmingly clear. A new infrastructure for connecting the software siloes within the organization, and increasingly across the chain of software suppliers, is now the bottleneck. Even the cars that previous generations learned to build so well now depend on dozens of software suppliers working together. Without automating the interaction between these suppliers in a way that supports collaboration and lean delivery across organizations, innovation is being stifled.

As Neelan reported in the Tasktop Year in Review, 2012 was huge for us with with 250% growth since our last birthday. A portion of the year went to thinking about what shape this new task “container” has in the software lifecycle. But it’s now clear that the problem is not the container, as the Mylyn model is nearly expressive enough, and our work with IBM in OSLC and W3C Linked Data is a good start to defining things like common query APIs. It turns out that the biggest gap is the lack of infrastructure for shipping this information between people and tools, and supporting the many previous attempts by each vendor in defining their own APIs specific to their specialization in the software lifecycle.

In 2012, Sync became the lifecycle integration platform of choice for numerous Fortune 100 companies. We got to learn what it was like to be building infrastructure and digging canals between vendors while becoming a mission critical component of the stack, which resulted in Sync’s transition to an enterprise-scale lifecycle integration bus. We’re looking forward to scaling this new kind of collaborative infrastructure in 2013, and making your software lifecycle as orchestrated as the flow of container ships through Vancouver’s magnificent harbor.

I never thought this day would come, but I can proudly announce that this fall I have joined the team at Tasktop! I am the 50th Tasktopian. My story started a long, long time ago when I was writing my first Java programs. At that time, I looked for a tool that would help me focus on my job without spending too much time on setup and javadoc reading. Eclipse had it all: quick fixes, content assist, fast search, syntax highlighting, you name it.

Years passed, and although my requirements have not changed much, my projects got bigger, the number of files increased tenfold, and I started to feel lost. This is when I discovered Mylyn (known as Mylar at that time), and used it to regain my programming efficiency. I have been a big fan of the tool ever since and can’t think of any other Eclipse add-on that makes as much of a difference in my everyday work.

In the meantime, I was lucky enough to start working on the Eclipse project itself. Becoming part of the open source community around Eclipse was an eye-opening experience. Watching all those smart people sharing thoughts and contributing patches, I finally understood why the tool is so great. I have been involved in multiple projects on the Eclipse Platform, including JDT, PDE, JGit/EGit and Orion, and have received commit rights to some of them, which is a recognition that I’m proud of.

Throughout my journey, I always held onto my motto that “to be the best, you need to learn and play with the best”. This is what prompted me to apply for a position at Tasktop Technologies. Now I’m proud to be part of the team,making the lives of thousands fellow programmers better, and I can’t wait to see how my journey with Tasktop will continue to unfold.

Agile has come of age, gone mainstream and, as evidenced by recent releases from our partners, the ALM landscape has permanently changed. This fall we saw the release of TFS 2012, RTC 4.0, and last week HP’s Agile Manager (AgM). These tools provide large-scale software delivery organizations with the latest and greatest features for each of the software delivery roles that they support. Tasktop 2.5 release is a roll up of new Tasktop Sync and Dev functionality that we now provide in order to allow organizations to make the most of these tools when adopting them for heterogeneous ALM environments. We have worked very closely with each of our partners in order to ensure that Tasktop is able to provide it’s real-time connectivity and collaboration flow for stakeholders whose roles span individual tools.

Tasktop Sync now has full support for Rational Team Concert 4.0. Our partnership with IBM was expanded recently by way of IBM OEM’ing Tasktop Sync (called IBM RLIA Tasktop Edition) in order to support their customers’ integration needs. Tasktop Sync ensures that those deploying RTC into a heterogeneous environment get the benefits of RTC across the myriad of tools being used for end-to-end software delivery.

While Microsoft provides one of the most vertically-integrated ALM offerings, the reality of today’s software delivery is often multi-platform and multi-vendor. This means that some developers will be building the back-end with .NET and Azure with everything tracked in TFS, while the mobile ASP is being built by another team working in JIRA, and the whole lot is being QA’d and requirements managed by HP ALM/QC. Sync now supports TFS 2012, including the hosted version of TFS, which expands our support of cloud hosted integration end-points.

HP just released a brand new, cloud hosted Agile planning tool called Agile Manager. Tasktop Dev, OEM’d by HP as ALI Dev, has been extended to support Agile Manager, and can be seen showcased on stage at last week’s HP Discover conference (see Dave’s post for more on that). This means that developers get the first rate Eclipse and Visual Studio IDE experience for this new slick Agile project management tool.

In our role as the “Switzerland” of ALM, it has been exciting to see Tasktop work closely with each of these vendors, as well as our other partners, each of whom is defining a different angle on the tools that enable Agile software delivery at scale. As always, our goal is to create the task-focused infrastructure that supports real-time flow of information between users collaborating across this new breed of tools.

Get Tasktop Sync 2.5

Energy, passion, Christmas markets, large beers and a crazy 80’s band are not what you would expect to associate with HP. But the annual HP Discover Europe event, which happened in Frankfurt, Germany from December 4th through 6th, included all that and more, and Tasktop was there…

I am always blown away by the sheer size and scale of HP Discover. The event brings together the whole portfolio of software, hardware, and services into one integrated message. For many industry pundits, who predicted the demise of HP, the event is a showcase of why HP is far from dead. Yes, there are issues, complexities, contradictions, and even a few false starts, but HP has enough ideas and energy to continue to deliver customer value well into the 21st century. In particular, I would like to draw your attention to two innovations in software which have made me stop and think – and yes, Tasktop is involved in one of them.

HP Anywhere
Okay, vendors, even my Grandmother has a mobile solution, but I was surprised by the sheer scope of HP’s story. The first release of this technology has concentrated on allowing HP legacy software to be accessed from mobile devices. Cynics may say ‘lipstick on a pig,’ but HP, like its customers, has to somehow navigate its legacy and heavily used software into a mobile world. To solve its own problems, HP is building a platform that can also help solve many of its customers’ issues. But HP Anywhere has a much grander vision, providing a framework to enable applications you create to be written once but deployed to many platforms, service hosting for simple connections to legacy software and development tools to enable mobile development. An interesting move, and it will require a fundamental shift in focus for software teams, who traditionally have not worked with developers or been aligned to a particular platform.

Agile Manager
Speaking of developers, Agile was also a key focus for HP Software with the release of Agile Manager, a SaaS offering that provides support for Agile project management, planning, and execution. Tasktop worked closely with HP in developer tool support, updating the HP OEM’d version of Tasktop Dev to include Agile Project Manager artifacts such as stories, tasks, and epics. This means that the team can plan in Agile Project Manager, and developers can work in their IDE on the same work items, updating them and then having them flow into HP ALM. This provides an end to end Agile solution from HP and with ALM / ALI folds into development management supporting the connection to the subversion change set in ALM. As you can imagine, there were lots of interesting discussions on what future integrations would look like with both HP product management and customers, but this was a great start.

The buzz at the booth
Exciting HP strategy and technology discussions were only part of the fun. The Tasktop booth attracted numerous people who wanted to discuss how to connect HP ALM to other tools and extend the L of ALM for their company. Lots of conversations about Atlassian JIRA, IBM RTC and MS Visual Studio TFS, but also some interesting conversations about PPM tools, service desk automation and customer lifecycle management platforms. Software development seems to be moving up the stack, with ALM being connected into broader and broader business systems. As an advocate of ALM and its mission, it was very exciting to hear ALM mentioned in the same breath as other more traditional business processes. And, for many organizations, ALM is a key business process!

An exciting three days, and I am already looking forward to HP Discover 2013 Europe, which will be held in Barcelona!

Today the IBM Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters Tasktop Edition appeared on the IBM price list. This OEM version of Tasktop Sync makes the technology broadly available to IBM clients using Rational Team Concert (RTC), who can now get all of the benefits of Tasktop Sync’s real-time and collaboration-centric ALM integration infrastructure. This helps IBM clients to successfully unify heterogeneous tooling environments with RTC capabilities.

Tasktop’s mission is to connect the world of software delivery by providing the cross-repository integration and infrastructure tools that weave together the numerous Agile, enterprise, and open source Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools present in today’s software delivery stack. To achieve this, Tasktop has been working very closely with the ALM community to help define the APIs and standards, such as Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and W3C Linked Data, which form the boundaries of the software value chain within your organization. Integration has become the main bottleneck to connecting the software lifecycle, and Tasktop has emerged as the “Switzerland of ALM”, with Sync becoming the equivalent of an Enterprise Service Bus for artifacts of the software delivery process.

We are thrilled to have this relationship with IBM to reduce the friction of getting the benefits of Tasktop Sync to the growing number of IBM Rational clients leveraging a rapidly evolving portfolio of enterprise Agile and ALM capabilities. With the Tasktop Sync infrastructure in place, RTC clients will be able to collaborate directly with other parts of the lifecycle, ranging from developers using lightweight issue trackers like JIRA and Bugzilla, to software development and testing suppliers using HP ALM or Quality Center. And the organization will get that critical unified traceability across the heterogeneous toolchain provided by RTC. Tasktop Sync is rapidly becoming the tool of choice for connecting software silos within the firewall and across the enterprise software supply chain.

The Tasktop and IBM relationship started during my PhD thesis, when Erich Gamma, a member of my thesis committee, one of the RTC architects, and I started to see how primary a role tasks (aka “work items”) had in connecting ALM artifacts. With tremendous effort going into creating the new systems of record for Agile and large-scale software delivery, which eventually led to RTC and the other modern ALM capabilities, we realized that Tasktop’s big opportunity was in using our common Mylyn-based model for weaving the various ALM systems of record together. That’s what developers see when they open up Tasktop Dev or Mylyn, and what the Sync bus is connecting when deployed in your ALM stack. Today we are officially connecting those dots by expanding our OEM partners to include IBM.

View the IBM product offering details, IBM product page or contact us to learn more.

A room full of developers and students, cans of beer loosely scattered around the room, along with bags of chips, pop and pizza. It’s a setup that would make more sense for a party, were it not for everyone clustering around power cords and loud finger tapping of engineers ripping up their laptops.

Sticking to traditional hackathon culture, there was a whole lot of coding, lots of beer, and happy chit chat mixed with serious faces betraying some heavy problem solving, in a word: hackathon-fun!

In attendence: several experienced Eclipse submitters, students from SFU and UBC, and other Eclipse enthusiasts. Projects hacked on: JDT UI, Scripted, Orion and Mylyn (for project details see the wiki page).

It was great to have Ian Skerrett from the Eclipse Foundataion attend and hack away with all the others. Great many ideas were thrown around and many a bug got fixed. Newbies got to learn a lot about Gerrit & Mylyn and how to contribute to open source. Thanx to all who attended and made the night that much better!

See more photos from the event.

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.