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TELECOMS AND SOFTWARE NEWS
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TaskTop provides ALM integration from the ground up
Tony Baer
TaskTop provides ALM integration from the ground up
TaskTop, a vendor whose free, open source task management tooling grew popular with individual Eclipse developers, has added task federation and activation support that makes it more compelling for teams. The new release adds significant heft to what has been a “good enough” approach to rationalizing the application lifecycle at working level. TaskTop's job is not yet complete as it still lacks integration with popular tools from HP and Microsoft, but its viral success shows that the most productive approaches for integrating the application lifecycle are coming from the bottom up.TaskTop's latest release makes its “good enough” ALM task-level integration useful for teams TaskTop emerged by leveraging the popularity of the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) that supported tooling plug-ins from multiple vendors. With Eclipse not providing any repository, TaskTop attacked a coordination gap by generating task lists for developers based on activity with defect tracing and source code control systems.It may not provide features such as auditability and traceability for the application lifecycle, but TaskTop solved a simple but annoying problem, helping to keep individual developers in sync with their workflows. The approach is hardly unique; Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), which has now been absorbed into the latest enterprise editions of Visual Studio, offers similar capabilities for .NET developers. However, with over a million downloads of TaskTop's Mylyn plug-in from Eclipse.org to date, the idea has clearly caught on in the Eclipse Java community.A new release this week takes a significant step in scaling out TaskTop's reach to team level. It adds new features for federating tasks and tracking their interdependencies. Another piece, task activation, grabs artifacts such as stories and related subtasks from project planning systems, fleshing out the tasks with context. It automates a formerly manual task.Although developers usually (but not always) work on one project at a time, task federation is especially valuable in helping them navigate dependencies, as often their work must wait until other developers on other teams finish code for other projects. Consequently, this makes the open source Mylyn technology at the core of TaskTop's enterprise tooling a compelling paid alternative to what individual developers were getting for free.TaskTop's third-party integration is hardly complete
TaskTop built its name developing connectors to defect tracking and source code control tools. It has developed numerous connectors, and with this new release is extending support outside the Java base to C and C++. However, it still has work to do with major tools such as HP Quality Center and has not heavily tapped the base of web developers using rapidly growing scripting languages such as PHP or Ruby on Rails.For hybrid Java and .NET environments, TaskTop has not yet developed ties with Microsoft's VSTS; as with the HP tools, TaskTop is likely to address that in the near future.TaskTop's task-level integration fits well with the legacy of the ALM market
Integration has long been the holy grail of the application lifecycle. There are numerous cultural and technical explanations for why ALM has never congealed as an integrated solutions market in the way that ERP or CRM has; for more background, see the Ovum report ALM: applying a business process-oriented paradigm.However, TaskTop has become the de facto integration layer between the Eclipse IDE and project management tools, and, more interestingly, many Eclipse tooling vendors are paying TaskTop to write those connectors. Clearly, TaskTop's bottom-up approach suits the fact that development organizations approach integration opportunistically, not strategically. They are simply seeking to address a point of pain. Significantly, IBM Rational Jazz's architecture is built on assumptions that integration will be federated across multiple systems of record as no group will relinquish hold over their assets, and will integrate with adjoining processes only when necessary. Even MKS, which uniquely offers a more traditional unitary solution, typically finds its customers implement it for source code control, requirements, test management, or planning - but usually not all of them.Keep your eyes on TaskTop's relationship with IBM Rational. TaskTop is hardly the only third party that is supporting IBM Rational's OSLC initiative for defining process interfaces for plugging into Jazz. However, its task management approach to workflow at ground level complements what IBM is striving for with Rational Team Concert, and would make a useful addition to the Jazz product line.
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