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.

When Mylyn was still known as Mylar, our Bugzilla listed a few hundred tasks for the project. Six years later, my Task List has accumulated over 10K tasks for Mylyn alone and contains twice as many tasks in total. To help manage large task lists like that, the just released Mylyn 3.7 enhances the filtering in the Task List with an incredibly useful feature for quickly finding tasks: a Lucene based index. With the latest version, it is now possible to scope searches and instantly query over the full comment streams of all tasks.

The powerful new search options are easily discoverable through content assist (Ctrl+space). I particularly like the ability to filter based on date range. If I know for instance that the task I am looking for was commented on recently I can now find the relevant tasks with a few key strokes:

There has been a lot of talk about Gerrit, and Eclipse projects are increasingly adopting code reviews as part of their workflow. The Gerrit connector, which has been evolving in the Mylyn Reviews project, is now included in Mylyn releases, the Juno repository, and available from connector discovery bringing the first-class IDE integration that Mylyn provides for tasks to code reviews.

We have incorporated a lot of feedback from early adopters and continuously improved the connector. It now supports Gerrit 2.2 (earlier versions have been reported to work as well) and ships with support for a variety of authentication mechanisms including Open ID. The connector is tightly integrated with the latest version of EGit and extends the import wizard for simple importing of projects. When a Gerrit server has been configured, the wizard provides a listing of all Git repositories from that server. This enables simple cloning and importing of available projects.

Another noteworthy enhancement is the improved compare editor integration. The editor now shows the structure of the review. You can navigate through patch sets and add comments inline.

A key feature of Gerrit is the ability to stage multiple iterations of a change. In practice each iteration, referred to as patch sets in Gerrit, equals a commit that is tracked in a separate branch. As in the Gerrit web interface, the review editor can now show differences between patch sets to review incremental changes.

Sometimes it’s seemingly simple enhancements that add a suprisingly big benefit. We have long recognized hyperlinks as a universal way to link artifacts and made them clickable in the Task Editor. This linking now works across builds, tasks and reviews.

For example, Loading the JUnit results or reviewing the console output of a failed build that is linked from a review comment is now literally two clicks away from the review editor.

If you are at EclipseCon in Reston don’t miss the opportunity to see Mylyn 3.7 in action. Visit Tasktop at booth #25 and also attend one of the great talks that will highlight new features. A full list of new features are described in the New & Noteworthy section.

		Read the Mylyn 3.7 New & Noteworthy
		Meet Tasktop at EclipseCon

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 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!

I joined Tasktop in part because I share the goal of increasing programmer productivity, especially by filtering out unimportant information.  I also liked how Tasktop is committed to being involved with and connected to the broader Eclipse community.

In this spirit, I suggested a feature to the EclEmma project: letting developers create and view incremental code coverage results.  This would let developers see a much smaller, but more relevant, set of classes and methods which they could then investigate.

It had bothered me how difficult it was to find where things happen in code, especially in large, unfamiliar code bases.  Yes, you can step through the code, but sometimes you have to step for a long time.  This is boring and tedious, and frequently you step one step too far and overshoot the place you wanted to see — losing the information about the values of the variables at the point you cared about.  If an asynchronous process gets spawned as the result of a Listener attached to a GUI element, it is nearly impossible to step through.

You can search for text on or around the GUI element to help you find where the actions related to that element are processed, but sometimes this isn’t practical.  Sometimes the GUI element has text that is so common that it is impractical to search for it, like “Finish” or “Next”.  Sometimes the GUI element doesn’t have text associated with it, like a button with a picture on it (and no tooltip).

In practice, I have observed that people usually guess at what words might be included in the class or method names, and then when they think they are close, simulate stepping through code by reading through it and making informed guesses about where the execution flow will go.  Unfortunately, frequently they guess wrong, usually in the choice of a starting point or the value of an if-condition.

Another particularly pernicious mistake is not realizing that you are tracing through a superclass of the class that is actually executed.  If you Command/control-click on a method name, Eclipse will preferentially take you to the implementation of that method in the same class; this means that if you ever trace into a superclass, Eclipse will tend to keep you in the superclass; realizing that you need to go back to the subclass is not always obvious.

I thus suggested to the EclEmma code coverage team that they add a feature to the code coverage tool to let users start and stop coverage so that they can see which code was executed for specific short periods of the execution.

With the 2.1 release of EclEmma, the EclEmma team has implemented incremental code coverage — a very useful feature!

How to use it

First, install EclEmma.

Next, go to Preferences > Java-Code Coverage, and check the “Reset execution data on dump”.

Open a Coverage view.  In the Coverage toolbar, there is a “Dump Execution Data” button.

Pressing the “Dump” button will now display coverage and reset the code coverage results.  Thus, if you press the dump button right *before* you do the action you are interested in (e.g. pressing a certain button), and then again right after you do the action, then the code coverage results will show only the exact classes and methods that were executed in response to that action.  Among other things, this means you won’t get misled to look in the superclass instead of the appropriate class.

If you need finer-grained information about which code executed, EclEmma colours your lines of code based on whether they were executed in that interval: green if they were fully executed, red if they were not executed at all, and yellow if they were partially executed (if, for example, the line uses a “?” ternary operator, as in the “drightSide” assignment below).

By default, EclEmma only shows coverage information for your code, not for all the libraries you bring in.  To change this, uncheck “Source folders only” in Preferences > Java > Code Coverage.

Note: while for code coverage, you probably want to see the coverage results for all classes and methods, when using incremental code coverage to locate places in code, you should select “Hide unused elements” from the Coverage toolbar’s drop-down menu.

Incremental code coverage is a very powerful technique: instead of wandering through thousands of classes and methods to find the handful of classes and methods that are interesting, you can spend a few minutes to get their names directly.

I do need to give a slight caveat: exceptions interfere with the code coverage instrumentation, interrupting the marking of that branch of code as executed.  That is a known limitation with the way that code coverage is done.  Thus if your code uses exceptions a lot, EclEmma might incorrectly say that a branch of code was not executed when it was in fact executed.   However, if EclEmma tells you that code was executed, it really was executed.

Using EclEmma in conjunction with Tasktop Dev or Mylyn is an exciting prospect.  Mylyn and Tasktop Dev tell you what you (or someone else, if you are looking at their context) had looked at; EclEmma gives you hints on what you should look at. We have only just started thinking about how those two could be combined, but are excited by the possibilities.

For further information, see EclEmma, Tasktop Dev, or Mylyn.

Note: the screenshots used from the open-source Java GIS tool GpsPrune, isolating the action of showing the scale legend.

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.

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.

For the past few years I have served on the Eclipse Board of Directors as an elected representative. I’m running again this year in the sustaining member category to help represent ecosystem of organizations that have made Eclipse successful, and to continue to refine the constructive dynamic that we have created in marrying commercial and community interests.

2012 marks the start of the second decade of Eclipse’s existence. I’ve been a committer on Eclipse for the past decade and have watched as an IBM initiative created a platform that now dominates the tooling space for professional developers outside working outside the VS/.NET stack. The leadership and innovation of Eclipse have created the modern pluggable IDE, innovated the code editing and navigation experience, fostered modern modeling technologies, and led the way in connecting the developer to the Agile, ALM and social coding movements. With the recent announcement of the VS 11 beta we’re reminded again that innovation can be cyclical. The first release of Eclipse from a dacade ago, visible above with its monochrome UI and toolbars, looks strikingly similar to latest version of VS 11 just announced (image from the Visual Studio blog).

While the strength of Microsoft is packaging a seamless end-to-end developer experience on a monolithic stack, the strength of Eclipse comes from the innovation driven by the large number of vendors leveraging Eclipse for gluing together the developer experience on heterogeneous stacks. For this next year of Eclipse’s evolution, both adapting the way that we build that tool stack in the social coding context, and improving ways to support our ecosystem of both community and vendor contributions, will be my priority if elected.

See my full vision statement on the Eclipse Board Elections page.