Tasktop

Well fortunately, there was no fiscal cliff (though the U.S. government did nothing more than my 4 year old son; it just kicked the can down the street) and somehow there was a day after even though the Mayan calendar just stopped. As such, I feel a little more comfortable writing a retrospective blog that is as much about the past as the future…

2012 was an eventful year for Tasktop. We kicked off 2012 celebrating our 5th anniversary. In this blog, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect less on Tasktop’s outwardly facing accomplishments that we highlighted in the press release and focus more on the behind the scenes aspects at Tasktop.

I truly believe that when we look back on 2012, it will be viewed as an inflection year for Tasktop.

Eclipse Mylyn and Tasktop Dev keep doing their thing. Driven by Android development and Asian programmers, Mylyn rode the wave of Eclipse adoption in 2012 and regularly sees 2+ million downloads per month. Tasktop Dev continues to make Eclipse and Visual Studio software programmers who use commercial tools (Mylyn is a great free choice if your development tool stack is open source) more productive.

2012 was the year that we validated Tasktop Sync as a viable solution for connecting the world of software delivery. Not only did we demonstrate the need for tools integration but also exposed how integration matters for process, collaboration and reporting. It’s been fascinating to learn how big a problem we have unearthed. With our Mylyn roots and our partner ecosystem, Tasktop is uniquely suited to address the challenges of tool heterogeneity which is ever-present and growing in the enterprise struggling to deliver high quality software in a timely manner.

As a bootstrapped company, we continued to grow steadily. We moved our corporate headquarters in Vancouver. We are thrilled about the new office because it allows us to create the team environment that is conducive to the innovation we are driving and the challenges we are trying to solve. We also opened an office in Austin, TX where our US headquarters are located and where many of our partners (CA, IBM, Micro Focus / Borland, Thoughtworks Studios, Smart Bear, etc.) and hopefully future partners (Planview, BMC, etc.) have a presence.

As we strive to do every year, we added some of the best and brightest young minds in the industry to our staff, and are proud to continue giving back to the educational system that has been so good to us as company through our active internship and co-op program. In addition, we added some grizzled veterans (I can’t say grey haired because some of them don’t have any hair) like Lance Knight, Dave West, Nicole Bryan and Jason Baldy. All of this has resulted in an organization that is inspired to solve a big problem, enjoys celebrating victories, has fun as a team, can be silly with each other, but has the organizational maturity to deliver high quality software for our customers and partners. At the end of the year, we added our 50th employee.

I am very proud of the work environment that we are creating at Tasktop. Its one thing to believe that we are balancing a fun place to work with the aspirations of a company trying to solve a really big problem; its even better when our staff and others in our community back that with recognitions such as BCBusiness Best Companies to Work for in BC and Technology Impact Award for Emerging Company of the Year.

We were also quite proud of our CEO and founder Mik Kersten who was named a finalist for the World Technology Award and a Business in Vancouver Forty under 40. We are thrilled that Mik is being recognized for his leadership and technical excellence.

We are excited about 2013 where you will see even more innovation and fun from Tasktop!

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.

It’s been an exciting time for Tasktop. Our Vancouver Headquarters has moved to a new West Georgia location, overlooking Vancouver’s cool Coal Harbor and beautiful Stanley Park, and sporting a spacious 7,000 square feet runway for us to ‘grow into’.

Our old office has been great but we’ve grown so much over the last year that it just couldn’t hold us any longer. We wanted something in the same part of town, that reflected the kind of company we are and we found it!

We finally moved to our new digs last week and are loving it. We’re especially pleased about the great restaurants on nearby Robson street, beautiful walking areas in Coal Harbour and Stanley Park, and we can’t wait to meet our new neighbours.

See more photos of our new office.

Want a chance to check out our new space and meet some interesting people? Join us for the Eclipse DemoCamp Hackathon on November 13th, held at our new corporate headquarters on 1100-1500 West Georgia Street. If last year’s event is any indication, this year’s Hackathon should be a smashing success.

Expect to meet a bunch of bright, friendly software-oriented folks from all walks of life in a fun and casual atmosphere, get satisfaction from sharing your knowledge and experience, and learn from others. If you’re interested in Open Source and especially Mylyn (Tasks, WikiText, Team/SCM, etc.) you’ll get a lot out of this event.

If you’re an Eclipse committer come and share your expertise and knowledge. Everyone is welcome to attend. Here are last year’s hackers busy at work during last year’s Hackathon.

If you plan on attending please put your name on the Hackathon wiki page. Bring your coding hat, and pizza, snacks and drinks are on us. Thanks to our co-organizers, VMware, for making this event possible.

And now, back to nesting…

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.

Started in 2011, Austin Startup Week is five days of events celebrating Austin startups, the organizations and meetups that support them, and all the awesome people that make Austin one of the greatest places to build a startup! This year’s lineup ran from October 8-12 and was packed full of over 30 events consisting of morning coffees, a startup career fair, mentor office hours, panels, regular meetups, happy hours, workshops, a Bazaar, Demo Day and the popular “ATX Startup Crawl”.

Tasktop showed off it new digs in the
ATX Startup Crawl that included over 40 Austin tech companies at a dozen different locations. The event which seems to happen twice per year is known to both local people and visitors that are interested in learning about the Austin tech startup scene. As you would expect in Austin (the self-proclaimed live music capital of the world) the ATX Startup Crawl takes place the night before two of Austin’s big live music events: SXSW and ACLFest.

With the Homeaway bus stop just a half block away, the ATX Startup Crawl was a great opportunity to show off our hip, new Austin office. Visitors got to meet the Tasktop Austin team and even a friendly visitor from our Vancouver home office. We also learned a lot about how better to ensure people find our offices for next year (the entrance is around the back of the building – oops), and that we need to have white wine and beer in addition to the red wine.

The wine and cheese was a hit, as was the conversation, demo, and tour of our Austin office. We have a great balcony view since we are across from the Whole Foods headquarters. See the photos from the event.

A special thank you to all the people that stopped by to learn about Tasktop, meet our team, and enjoy the night festivities.

Today, I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the Leading Moms event in Vancouver. I was blown away by the talks I heard, stories of women and moms changing the world from Vancouver be it setting up birthing centers in Uganda to the environmental and health improvements biotechnology can bring us.

I had the chance to speak on something about technology that personally resonates with me. The choice was easy. Eight or so years ago when Mik Kersten and I first started working on the ideas behind task-focused interfaces, my work days and in fact my life started to change. I chose to share some of those experiences by speaking about The Power of Tasks.

The basic concepts of actionable tasks, separated by categories with schedule and due dates can really make a difference in one’s productivity, in freeing one’s mind from the details to allow for creativity and in simply getting things done. This power of tasks is available to software developers through Mylyn and Tasktop Dev. One day in the future, hopefully every mom can also benefit from this technology to make their lives better.