Last week Mik Kersten, creator of Mylyn and Tasktop CEO, presented a webinar introducing the newly released Tasktop Sync. Attendees watched Tasktop Sync in action and learned about the many challenges that it solves in today’s heterogeneous organizations. If you missed the webinar, click the image below to watch a recording.
During the webinar, Kersten showed how Tasktop Sync helps to bridge the gap between software planning and development by connecting development, QA, and agile project management, and allowing each stakeholder to access the data that they need within their tool of choice. Kersten also showed how Tasktop Sync accomplishes real-time ALM server synchronization, with support for over two dozen ALM tools.
Sync provides the first of its kind enterprise-scale ALM synchronization solution that is built on the industry-standard Eclipse Mylyn ALM integration framework. Learn more about Tasktop Sync.
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
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.
The new Tasktop Sync, released last month, provides real-time ALM server synchronization, with support for over two dozen ALM tools. Sync provides the first of its kind enterprise-scale ALM synchronization solution that is built on the industry-standard Eclipse Mylyn ALM integration framework. Created using Tasktop’s Task Federation™ technology, Tasktop Sync ensures that each stakeholder has access to the data that they need within their tool of choice.
To help you fully take advantage of the new Tasktop Sync, Mik Kersten, creator of Mylyn and Tasktop CEO, will present a Tasktop Sync webinar to demonstrate its capabilities. During the webinar, Mik will show how Tasktop Sync connects development, QA, and agile project management stakeholders and discuss the challenges that Tasktop Sync solves.
Hot on the heels of the Tasktop Sync 1.0 release, we are pleased to announce the availability of Tasktop Dev 2.1. As an indication of our focus on the Agile and ALM needs of the developer, the product line previously known as Tasktop is now called Tasktop Dev. This release builds on the Eclipse Indigo release of Mylyn 3.6, includes the latest connectors, productivity features and new Agile planning support, and is a significant step forward in terms of connecting developers to both the Agile and the traditional planning process, while ensuring that we get to use the best-of-breed ALM and open source technologies that make us productive.
James Governor (RedMonk founder and Principal Analyst) and I discussed the release and walked through some of the key features:
HP ALM & Quality Center 11 on Mac, Linux and 64-bit Windows
HP ALM Requirements, Defects and Tests can now be retrieved on Mac, Linux and 64-bit Windows machines using the REST connection provided by ALM 11 instead of the native connection. This feature is only supported when connecting to ALM 11 Patch 2 or higher.
HP ALM & Quality Center Tests
You can now bring HP ALM Tests into your Task List along side your HP ALM Defects and Requirements.
Tasktop for VS: Ability to View Task Associations
The Visual Studio task editor now displays task associations, making it easy to see the parent and child relationships and external dependencies inside Visual Studio. Double-clicking an associated task opens it in the task editor, allowing you to quickly access its content.
Planner Story Board and Kanban
The planning tools now support Kanban for compatible ALM tools, and includes a story board and WIP limits. The release planner now supports grouping stories and tasks by activity or assignee, allowing you to organize your planning around these high level concepts.
Focus plan on My Tasks
The task board and story board now include a “Focus on My Tasks” button which shows you only the tasks or stories that are assigned to you.
In our mission to improve the productivity of software development, our focus to date has been the developer. With Mylyn for the masses and Tasktop for the Enterprise, we have provided developers the tools that they need to focus on coding amidst constant interruptions and organizational shifts between disparate application lifecycle management (ALM) tools and ever-evolving flavors of Agile. Mylyn and Tasktop provide developers a single pane of glass through which to view all parts of the application lifecycle relevant to their work. But other key stakeholders, who do not live in the IDE, are missing this visibility. Over the course of the past decade, as the heterogeneity of ALM has increased the vantage of these stakeholders decreased. Today we are announcing a new product that will bring all members of the development process into the modern software delivery loop.
Tasktop Sync moves our existing Task Federation(tm) technology from a developer’s desktop client to the server. Developers’ need for Task Federation arose from the fact that in larger organizations, development tasks span multiple systems, from requirements definitions to defects, from issues to change sets and from tests to builds. But tasks not only span systems, they also span stakeholders. If a tester needs to email a developer to get clarification on a fix, or to email a business analyst for details on a requirement related to testing, the ALM stack is broken. With application complexity continually rising, it is no longer feasible to effectively collaborate and report over disconnected chains of email. Just as Tasktop, Mylyn and the task-focused interface have been instrumental at starting to bring about the end of email between developers, today we are embarking on connecting the other members of the software lifecycle. The difference is that unlike developers, most other stakeholders do not live in an IDE-type rich client capable of bringing the many disparate forms of software project information together. Their window on the software delivery process is the web browser. To support them, we needed to integrate directly with the data models of the tools that they use.
Tasktop Sync is the first real-time synchronizer for ALM. While synchronization is largely solved for email and contacts, with protocols and synchronizers working seamlessly across Microsoft Exchange, IMAP, Google Apps and iOS, the lack of a scalable and generic solution has been an endemic problem in large-scale ALM. With Tasktop Sync, the ALM architect simply sets up a mapping between the various ALM systems of record for requirements, Agile, development and testing. For example, the mapping may specify that defects should be one-to-one mapped between the Agile tracker and the defect tracker. Once Tasktop sync has built up its cache, every change in the test system is propagated instantly to the agile tool, and back again, ensuring that all stakeholders can work in their system of choice. We have built on the Mylyn frameworks, Tasktop Certified ecosystem of connectors, and our deep partnerships with the leading Agile and ALM vendors to create this entirely new level of ALM interoperability.
If you are involved in an Agile rollout or ALM modernization effort that is struggling with disconnected tools and increasing presence of open source in the stack, Tasktop Sync will provide you with the integration that you need for all stakeholders to collaborate with context in their tool of choice.
This year, Tasktop Technologies and VMware co-hosted the Eclipse Indigo DemoCamp in Vancouver. The event was a smashing success with some 60 developers in attendance, awesome networking and even cooler talks including:
Benjamin Cabé from Sierra Wireless presenting on Koneki
Rafael Chaves from Abstratt Technologies presenting: “Full code generation with AlphaSimple” (AlphaSimple is an online modeling tool built on Eclipse technology)
Kris De Volder from VMware presenting on Cloud Foundry
Presentation by Ed Merks, project lead of the Eclipse Modeling Framework project
David Green of Tasktop Technologies presenting the latest Mylyn integrations for Git, Gerrit and Hudson (see photo below)
To get a sense for what Demo Camps are all about, watch the video of the opening talks from VMware’s Andrew Eisenberg, Eclipse’s Ralph Mueller, and Tasktop’s David Green available here: http://vimeo.com/25746826. We were not able to capture the sessions, but hope to do so next time.
After the event, we all headed out to a nearby Lennox Pub for more fun and networking…
In this picture, Ralph Muller of the Eclipse Foundation, as well as Andrew Eisenberg of VMware and other developers networking in the background.
Ever wondered what is going on inside the brain of people working at Tasktop?
Last week, I had to honor to speak at Skills Matter, Europe’s largest provider of open-source and agile trainings in the London area. It was a great time in London and Skills Matter was kind enough to provide a recorded version of the talk for people who could not attend.
As part of their branding, the talk was titled: “In The Brain of Benjamin Muskalla: Mylyn: Closing the Agile ALM loop with task-focused collaboration” so I thought: when you’re able to know what’s going on in my brain, I don’t even need to talk about anything. You’ll expierence some silence up to 5:20 as we forgot to turn on the microphone. As the whole talk is about 1:20h, it’s still worth watching it if you want to find out how to do task-focused collaboration with Mylyn and Tasktop. In addition, there is a quick outlook in the connectors coming up around code review with Gerrit and the Git integration for Mylyn.
Tasktop 2.0.2 for Visual Studio has been released. This maintenance release is focused on smoothing the installation and configuration process for users in corporate development environments. For instance, Tasktop can now handle the alternate locations of user profile directories that occur in some enterprise environments.
Many users will be unaffected by these fixes. However, if the Task List view in Visual Studio freezes while displaying the message “The Task List service is initializing…” then you may need this update. While this message is shown, if you click on an action in the Task List view toolbar (e.g. New Task), Visual Studio may freeze and it must be forcefully quit. Both of these issues are fixed in this service release. If you still have problems after upgrading, there are some work-arounds on the FAQ noted below.
Read the FAQ entry regarding the “The Task List service is initializing…” message with additional work-arounds.
Planning tools form an integral part of any software project and picking a good planning tool can be critical to success. But for teams working in large enterprises it isn’t as simple as picking which planning tool they think is best. In large enterprises, a significant part of many projects involves integration between heterogeneous systems, and planning in that context becomes an exercise in integration as well. With requirements in one system and defects in another, planning can be tedious and seeing the larger picture difficult.
Imagine you’re ScrumMaster for a team in a large company that uses HP ALM’s Agile Accelerator for release planning. Your company has just acquired a small start-up and your next release will involve full scale integrations with that company’s existing products. They’ve spent the last couple of years building up a product backlog in Rally and have a good amount of historical data to track velocity. The tools are familiar to them and have become part of the routine for developers in their daily work and during scrum meetings so you don’t want to disrupt their productivity by switching tools.
But the new phase of development involves integrating products that have issues and defects being tracked in two completely different systems. With the timelines and deliverables now intertwined, trying to plan across these two different systems is proving to be difficult because it’s not easy to see the dependencies between the two systems.
Tasktop has recognized that for many teams the choice of planning tools may be largely determined by existing infrastructure in the organization, and that the next generation of planning support will embrace and flow with the differences in that infrastructure, rather than try to enforce sameness.
So how does Tasktop make Agile planning work in this kind of environment? The Tasktop Planner provides an extra level of flexibility in planning by allowing you to mix plans from different repositories. You can have your user stories and sprints in Rally, your defects in HP Quality Centre, and still be able to plan everything in one place.
Tasktop Planner provides a unified interface for planning across different systems and lets you create associations between those systems. And you can do all of this right from within your development environment where it’s possible to navigate from a user story in one system to a defect in another to a line of code in your IDE.
To help you fully harness the power of Tasktop’s Agile Planning, I will be offering a free webinar on cross-repository Agile planning:
When:
May 26, 2010: 9 am PDT (GMT-7)
Presented by:
Doug Janzen, Senior Software Developer and Project Manager at Tasktop Technologies
In this webinar, I will explain why it is so important to have Agile tools be able to reach across repositories to be truly usable by companies. I will then demonstrate how Tasktop’s cross-repository Agile planning works highlighting how sub-tasks in a user story or on a Scrum board can have dependencies on issues from other systems. I will also highlight how all of this information can be available from within the Eclipse IDE as well as in an offline manner.
To learn more about the Tasktop Planner and how it can help bridge the gap between heterogeneous plans download an evaluation copy of Tasktop Enterprise or sign up for the webinar:
The Tasktop team is growing again! We have four new technical positions available. This is a great opportunity to join a fantastic team of world-class engineers who affect hundreds of thousands of people through open source and our proprietary innovations.
The Tasktop Team, Vancouver contingent
Before I joined Tasktop, I was astounded at the Tasktop’s velocity and the impact they’ve had on software developers through Tasktop’s “less is more” approach to developer tools and the task-focused interface. Now that I’ve seen it from the inside, I understand that it’s a combination of many factors: the caliber of the team, the extent to which Tasktop’s innovation is driven by community, the way that Tasktop works with its customers and partners, the connection to thought leadership both within Tasktop and at large, the way that Tasktop communicates and organizes, and Tasktop’s culture of listening to and empowering the individual.
If you’re passionate about software and people, love technology and tools, have a persistent hunger for learning, and want to work with some of the best minds in the industry, apply and join the Tasktop team!
