Tasktop

As organizations increasingly become software driven, the role of the application lifecycle is taking a new meaning. Connecting stakeholders in the software lifecycle ceases being a nice to have and any gap in connectivity quickly becomes the bottleneck of software delivery. The organizations are now noticing the friction of having developers do duplicate data entry between their issue tracker and Agile tool, or testers and business analysts queuing up weeks of defects and requirements before handing them off to developers. The application lifecycle is only as efficient as its weakest link, and if that link is manual and based on large batches and handoffs, frustration for the individuals and large-scale inefficiencies result.

With Tasktop Sync we created the first general way to connect software delivery stakeholders working in best-of-breed tools across the application lifecycle management (ALM) stack. As we’ve been rolling out Tasktop Sync over the past year to IT organizations around the world, we’ve noticed a number of things. Organizations, especially those who have been around for a while, are trying desperately to apply ALM Automation across the enterprise. To do this, these organizations are having to inventory their tool sets and identify the information flows and the workflows between stakeholders and between their tools, usually for the very first time.

Often acting as a cross between marriage counselor and coach, the Tasktop expert’s first activity in a deployment is to gather they key stakeholders from management, quality assurance, development, and business analysis in a room with as big a white board as possible. In this meeting, the organization will identify the important tools used by each stakeholder, how information needs to flow between these tools, what are the key workflows within each stakeholder silo, and what activities kick off workflows in other silos. The edges connecting the ALM repositories turn out to be various kinds of tasks that represent the lines of collaboration between the stakeholders, and that are then mapped between the various vendors’ tools with Tasktop Sync’s real-time ALM artifact synchronization solution.

In the forthcoming release of Tasktop Sync, we have formalized the lessons learned of the past year with a new authoring tool called Sync Studio. Our expertise is now captured in visual tools for cross-ALM system task and workflow mapping, ALM architecture design, monitoring tools to ease integration maintenance and alert notifications for project and system administrators. To help IT organizations scale Tasktop Sync deployments and better manage the growing number of ALM systems in a typical tool stack, Sync Studio provides a whole new set of ALM infrastructure management tools. Capabilities include:

		A Unified View across the ALM Stack: Sync Studio presents ALM architects and administrators with a comprehensive and “live” architectural view of current tools and processes, and the associated interdependencies and roadblocks that need to be addressed.
		Visual Mapping for ALM Administrators: Sync Studio provides automated mapping capabilities for ALM administrators to author and configure task, data and workflow connectivity and integration between ALM servers.
		Cross-repository Monitoring and Administration: Sync Studio helps maintain the health and performance of enterprise-wide ALM architectures through the regular monitoring of inter-tool functionality and centralized administration of changes, maintenance, trouble-shooting and alert notifications.
		End-to-end Traceability for the Lifecycle: through its Task Federation platform, Sync Studio provides complete ALM traceability that is available through the visual mapping and visibility capabilities now available in the tool.

Tasktop Sync is being announced today as part of our coordinated Tasktop 2.3 release. A notable feature from Sync the instantaneous task querying needed for Sync’s conflict resolution, is getting pushed down into Eclipse Mylyn for the benefit of our developer users as we continue to build out both the Tasktop commercial tools and the underlying Mylyn frameworks needed to support Task Federation, both on the server side with Tasktop Sync and on the developer’s desktop with Tasktop Dev and Mylyn.

Tasktop Sync 2.3

		Sync Studio: Visual Mapping, Monitoring, Validation and Notifications
		Sync Server: Scalability & failover support
		New connectors: Accept 360, ThoughtWorks Mingle, full RTC Schema support

Tasktop Dev 2.3

		New OEM Edition for HP Quality Center
		Mylyn 3.7, including instant Task List search
		New connectors: Gerrit code reivew
		See New & Noteworthy for more

Contact us for a demo of Sync Studio.

Tasktop attended the Eclipse Foundation Island at CeBIT 2012, an event with massive attendance. Eclipse Island is part of the Open-Source forum which is one of a many booths in the hall which is one of out of two dozen halls, located a mere twenty minute walk from the main entrance. Still, a lot of folks were finding us to discuss Mylyn, Tasktop and Sync or ask where they can get the free Eclipse CDs.

When we weren’t busy demoing the latest Tasktop features we had a fun time explaining to 12 year olds that they need Git, Gerrit and Hudson if they want to be successful programmers. We’re watching for a flood of resumes around 2026. If you want to work with these tools now, check out our careers page for openings.

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!

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…

Microsoft has just announced the Team Foundation Server 11 Beta. We’ve had the privilege of working in partnership with Microsoft R&D to test pre-beta versions of TFS 11 with Tasktop Sync. The GA version of TFS 11 isn’t expected to ship for a while but to ensure Tasktop Sync, Tasktop Dev, and Eclipse Mylyn achieve their promise of seamless interoperability, we work closely with ALM vendors long before GA. This early collaboration typically involves testing new API and creating features tailored to the new versions. Thanks to partnerships like this with leading ALM vendors, for Tasktop Certified ALM tools, we release compatible versions of Tasktop at the same time as new versions of ALM systems become generally available.

The development drops of TFS 11 that Tasktop has been testing also power Microsoft’s new Team Foundation Service that will offer TFS hosted in cloud. This means Sync will work with both on premise and cloud versions of TFS 11. As long as Sync has network access to the systems being synchronized, both Sync and the synchronized ALM systems can live anywhere.

Check out the video below to see Tasktop Sync in action with the new TFS 11 Beta. In the video Tasktop’s Doug Janzen demonstrates an example configuration where TFS is synchronized with HP ALM 11. The video shows new defects being instantly created and kept in sync across both systems and provides a peek at how fields are mapped between the HP and Microsoft systems.

We’ll keep testing new drops from Microsoft and look forward to simultaneously releasing compatible versions Tasktop when TFS 11 goes live — in both on premise and cloud-hosted forms. Sign up for the Tasktop newsletter to hear when the GA integration will be available.

I’ve long been an admirer of Tasktop, for a number of reasons: First, as Eclipse users already know, Tasktop has built some really cool Eclipse technology, including the Mylyn task-focused interface. But many companies have built cool open source tools. It’s much harder to take those tools and build a growing, dynamic company around them. But plenty of companies have also done that, usually by following the standard open source business model: package services and a bit of value-add around a captive open-source offering, and wait for customers. Tasktop takes a far more challenging and rewarding approach: It nurtures a healthy open source eco-system around core technologies, but then re-imagines and re-purposes them, leveraging unique products that address real customer pain. That takes real vision, and to me it’s a clear signal that the Tasktop leadership is able to imagine and execute at an entirely different energy level.

So rather than admire Tasktop from a distance, I joined it! I first worked with Tasktop last year as a consultant developing the initial implementation of what has become the Mylyn Model Focusing Tools project. That was a great opportunity to get to know some of the team and the Tasktop way. Everything I saw then fit nicely with what I’d already intuited. We have a really great combination of engineering excellence, creativity and lightweight organization.

It’s nice to say “we” again — I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed having colleagues to work together with on challenging problems. The morning I joined Tasktop, I saw a stream of emails from everyone welcoming me to the team. I must admit to some cynicism about the whole “team” thing — like so much else, it can be an empty word that doesn’t match up to reality — but in this case it feels very genuine. So heartfelt thanks to everyone.

It’s an exciting time to be building software tools. It might sound funny, but I like to think of software development as a helping profession. That’s because I think that software products really can help people live more fulfilling, interesting and even happy lives. When I tell my family and non-techie friends that I’m working on Automated Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools I get a blank look. So instead I remind them that almost everything we do relies on software and that software programs are by far the the most complex artifact that humans have ever created. And I tell them that software development communities are growing ever more diverse, distributed, interwoven and complex. So what do we do at Tasktop? We build software that embraces those complexities.

Tasktop Dev tackles the issue of software complexity. It handles a lot of the repetitive and boring stuff, simplifies and clarifies everything else, and is deeply and imaginatively integrated with other development tools. Tasktop Sync and Code2Cloud — along with other exciting tools that we’re working on — tackle the even more challenging issue of community complexity. Even a relatively small software product might involve code developed by a rich community spanning companies, technologies, continents, and even (think about the Open-Source movement) different economic models and incentive systems. And in larger projects thousands of developers might be collaborating across all of these dimensions. Software development efforts are intimately connected with customers, management, marketing, support, regulators and every other imaginable kind of stakeholder. All of these people need to talk to one another, and it seems that everyone uses different tools to manage the unique aspects of their tasks or work environments. Tasktop builds software that helps those tools to work together so that everyone can focus together on the stuff that matters. In short, we break down boundaries and help people communicate. That’s worth doing.

Five years ago, on Friday January 15th, I defended my PhD thesis on Focusing Knowledge Work with Task Context. The following Monday, January 17th, we incorporated Tasktop Technologies. Driven by the years of research that it took to prove that tasks are more important than files, integration is more important than features, and that focus begets flow, we embarked on a journey to bring to market a transformation in how we work and collaborate around software.

Our journey and passion have been fueled by our customers and our open source community, as to date we have not taken any external funding, and instead embarked on what’s more recently been defined as the Lean Startup approach to building a company in an Agile and customer-centric fashion. Bootstrapping, we have doubled in revenue and nearly doubled in head count each year since our inception, and now support over a thousand customers and over a million open source users. Working closely with our ISV partners, the Eclipse community and open source ALM projects, we are proud to be one of the key contributors defining the future of ALM.

In addition to the opportunity to be a part of a transformative endeavor, what’s guided our vision is a manic focus on the needs of individual software workers. Mylyn and its commercial counterpart, Tasktop Dev, materialized because the growth in complexity of software and the fragmentation of ALM tools were bringing our and our fellow developers’ productivity to a halt. Tasktop Sync was born out of the same need to give other stakeholders such as testers, project managers and business analysts, a connected and collaborative view on the software delivery process. With our focus on integration, our goal is to empower developers and other stakeholders in order to advance ALM to support the rise of the software-powered economy.

We want to take this birthday moment to thank all of the customers and partners who have made it possible for us to do what we love, which is to invent the future of ALM and to strive for our goal of doubling the productivity of software developers and managers. We hope you like the next round of innovations that we are hard at work for launching in 2012, which will be a definitive year for software, for ALM and for Tasktop Technologies.

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.