Tasktop

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.

This year’s Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit was held in Vegas. What better place to learn both blackjack and IT strategy especially when two of the Tasktopians were on the MIT Blackjack team. We had a cool handout highlighting the pain points that Tasktop Dev and Tasktop Sync help solve, as well as a basic strategy table for Blackjack. Tasktop was a silver sponsor of the event and we had a blast networking and strategizing with fellow innovators and industry leaders.

We had a lot of fun hanging out with our new partners from Borland who attended the show as well. We’re proud to announce that customers of Borland StarTeam can now gain interoperability and integration via Tasktop Dev and Tasktop Sync. The desserts at Serendipity were bigger than Borland product manager Nicole’s head.

Congrats to Naji from California who won a new iPad2 in the Tasktop giveaway draw.

We’re pleased to announce the release of a full-featured Mylyn Connector for Borland StarTeam, a robust and scalable platform for software project and source code management. This new connector is available for both Tasktop Dev (Eclipse and Visual Studio) and Tasktop Sync and is the result of a close R&D collaboration with Borland, a Micro Focus company. Today Borland is also announcing that StarTeam 12.0 will be released on December 16th 2011. This latest version of the platform includes a number of new capabilities that complement the new interoperability provided by the connector.

Connect StarTeam with Eclipse and Visual Studio Development

The StarTeam Mylyn connector provides integrated access to StarTeam artifacts
such as tasks, defects and requirements, all from the Eclipse or Visual Studio IDE. In Eclipse, Mylyn’s task focused programming productivity capabilities are fully supported, enabling developers to recover from interruptions and view only the relevant code for a task with a single click.

StarTeam tasks and task editor

Time tracking is a painful reality for many developers but with the StarTeam connector time spent on each task is automatically tracked, making it easy for developers to adjust recorded time as needed and submit it to the StarTeam server. The StarTeam task editor also displays a chart showing when and how much time was spent on the task in the recent past.

Bi-directional task to code traceability

The new connector also seamlessly extends Borland’s existing StarTeam Eclipse Client (STEC) to group file changes on a per-task basis and automate the tedious task of writing commit comments when submitting code. The automatically generated commit comments include a link to the relevant task, which establishes traceability between the code and the relevant defect or other project management task.

Eclipse Synchronize view with StarTeam code changes grouped by task

This connector can also automatically update StarTeam tasks with the reverse link back to the relevant code for full bi-directional traceability. To support teams in mixed ALM environments, this automated traceability can also be provided between StarTeam tasks and SCM artifacts in Microsoft TFS or Subversion.

Attach commit traces to the task	View traces in the task editor

Connect StarTeam to dozens of ALM systems with Tasktop Sync

The new StarTeam Connector is also available with Tasktop Sync, enabling instant bi-directional synchronization between StarTeam and dozens of third party ALM systems. One of the new features in StarTeam 12.0 is the introduction of Custom Components, which allows arbitrary artifacts to be defined and managed in StarTeam. Tasktop Sync takes advantage of this capability to synchronize arbitrary artifacts from third party systems with StarTeam. This ensures that each stakeholder has access to the data they need within their primary tool while making StarTeam a hub for comprehensive visibility and reporting across a diverse set of tools.

Through the Eclipse, Visual Studio, and Sync integration capabilities provided by this connector, organizations with new or existing StarTeam deployments can now enjoy a new dose of integration bliss.

The Borland StarTeam Connector is available now via Tasktop Dev Enterprise and Tasktop Sync.

		Read the announcement press release
		View StarTeam connector product information
		Download Tasktop Dev Enterprise with the Borland StarTeam Connector

Our aim is to transform software delivery by unifying ALM and empowering developers as the core stakeholders of application delivery. The Tasktop Sync 1.0 release provided the first ALM integration middleware for the wide range of enterprise, Agile and open source ALM tools. They key change that Tasktop Sync enabled was to connect developers with the other stakeholders in the process, such as testers and Agile project managers. By building on the Eclipse Mylyn open source frameworks and ecosystem of Mylyn connectors, we were able to focus our efforts on creating a new kind of synchronization framework capable of providing immediate updates across vendors’ and open source ALM tools. It’s this real-time aspect that created the game changer in terms of collaboration, since for the first time, developers and testers could use their tool of choice while their task updates and comments propagated instantly across organizational boundaries. Not only does this reduce tedious email inbox overload and put ALM data where it belongs, it is a critical step in addressing the ALM disconnect that for many organizations has become is the main bottleneck on large-scale software delivery.

Since the 1.0 release of Sync, we have been swamped with requests to help organizations weave together disconnected best-of-breed ALM tools. A problem we quickly discovered with deploying Sync 1.0 is that most organizations do not have their ALM architecture or data models documented, as these have been scattered across disparate tools and departments. In order to help organizations do for themselves what our professional services division provides, we have added a repository introspection tool capable of connecting to each of your ALM tools and retrieving each repository’s data model. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to connect the ALM stack, and given the state of ALM today, that has meant creating a whole new set of ALM data model management tools in order to achieve this.

The biggest new feature of Sync 2.0 is new OSLC-based support for linking application lifecycle artifacts. This feature has been three years in the making, kicked off when we started collaborating with IBM on the OSLC-CM protocol, targeted at linking together our common representation of tasks across various ALM systems. The immediate benefit of this new linking support is for organizations with IBM CLM tools in their stack, such as Rational Team Concert (RTC) and Rational Requirements Composer (RRC). In addition to providing the full synchronization that enables collaboration, Tasktop Sync can now link and retrieve ALM data on-demand via this new OSLC-based REST layer. In the video above, you can see a demo of how we are able to leverage the CLM tools seamless embedding of OSLC data in order to provide rich linking as an alternative to full synchronization, particularly suitable to connecting Requirements Management tools to dev and QA tools.

Tasktop Sync is continuing to evolve rapidly in order to become the glue needed to modernize and connect the ALM stack. We have been working very closely with our partners, who are driving the innovation of Agile and ALM features, and ensuring that the new capabilities that they are add are seamlessly exposed in the Sync and Dev products. In order to provide the developer-centric view on our partners’ rapidly evolving ALM tools, we are also releasing a new version of Tasktop Dev, as well as a key new integration, both to be announced later this week. Stay posted for those announcements, and check out all of the new features and overview videos on the Sync 2.0 web page.