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March 22, 2012

TASKTOP CREATES OEM VERSION OF TASKTOP DEV FOR HP

VANCOUVER, BC, March 22, 2012 – Tasktop Technologies (www.tasktop.com), creators of Eclipse Mylyn and the leader in application lifecycle management (ALM) automation tools, today announced that a new original equipment manufacturer (OEM) version of Tasktop Dev (http://tasktop.com/support/new/index-dev22) is now embedded in HP Application Lifecycle Intelligence.

With today’s announcement, developers can now accelerate delivery of new innovative applications to the business by automatically provisioning their development environments. The collaboration capabilities provide application delivery teams with visibility, predictability and intelligence that ensure business continuity and customer satisfaction.  .

The enhanced offering enables end-to-end traceability across the application lifecycle. Developers can gain better visibility into data by breaking down information barriers with contextual reporting spanning the entire application lifecycle. The integration improves productivity with contextual information so that enables developers to view ALM artifacts in their IDE while coding tasks, requirements, defects and test results.  This results in a clear understanding of the functionality needed by the code.

With this integration, developers can now reduce cycle times and increase collaboration with the ability to automatically connect to their IDE of choice with new out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse as well as a wide variety of development tools including Subversion, Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Hudson, and Jenkins. This also provides developers with access to ALM artifacts right from their IDE.

In addition, the new Tasktop Workspace Provisioning (tasktop.com/hp) technology enables developers to automatically provision development environments comprised of IDEs, SCM and build management systems to reduce time-consuming and administrative tasks that erode developer productivity.

“With the growing complexity and heterogeneous make up of today’s ALM stacks, it is imperative that developers have a single and integrated ‘pane of glass’ that keeps them connected to other stakeholders while staying focused on the flow of coding activity,” said Mik Kersten, CEO, Tasktop Technologies. “Working together with HP, we have created a seamless developer experience that brings all information connected by HP ALM into integrated development environments (IDE), from provisioning of source code for a new release to receiving a build notification from the continuous integration (CI) server of choice.”

“Application development teams need to work with their choice of tools and systems without being constrained by time-consuming, administrative development tasks,” said Matthew Morgan, senior director, Product and Solution Marketing, Software, HP.  “This solution enables developers to automatically provision development environments, while enhancing context-driven collaboration across application delivery teams. This allows them to focus on what really matters – accelerating delivery of new, innovative applications.”

Both Tasktop Dev, a developer desktop ALM integration, and Tasktop Sync, (http://tasktop.com/support/new/index-sync20) an ALM middleware integration, are built on the industry-standard, open source Eclipse Mylyn ALM interoperability framework. The Tasktop Dev Enterprise Edition (http://tasktop.com/support/new/index-dev22)  provides more than 80 additional integrations beyond what is available in the OEM version of Tasktop Dev for HP.  With Tasktop Sync, users have real-time synchronization, automatic and configurable conflict resolution, and support for more than two dozen leading Agile and ALM change management tools. Building on and extending the developer-centric Tasktop Dev experience, Tasktop Sync’s integration with HP ALM furthers collaboration in the application lifecycle by unifying heterogeneous ALM stacks. This enables developers, testers, business analysts and managers to work within their best-of-breed tools of choice, while automatically maintaining traceability across ALM artifacts.

For more information please visit the Tasktop blog at: (http://tasktop.com/blog/news/hp-oem-announced)

About Tasktop Technologies

Tasktop Technologies is transforming the productivity of software delivery by unifying Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and empowering developers with task-focused tools. Tasktop invented the task-focused interface and created the popular Eclipse Mylyn project, which transformed the developer’s IDE experience to center around ALM tool-based collaboration. Building on top of Mylyn, Tasktop has been unifying the ALM landscape with its broad ecosystem of ALM partnerships that connect disparate tools from leading Agile, enterprise ALM and open source offerings. Tasktop’s Task Federation™ technology builds on this ecosystem to unify heterogeneous ALM stacks by allowing developers, testers and managers to work within their best-of-breed tools of choice, while automatically maintaining traceability and visibility across ALM artifacts. Its Tasktop Sync provides the only real-time bidirectional and fully automated synchronization between ALM servers. Tasktop Dev is the developer-centric ALM interface for the Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs, making it dramatically easier for developers to work and collaborate, while keeping ALM tools up-to-date with development activity. For more information please visit: http://tasktop.com.

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Media Contact:

Christie Denniston

Catapult PR-IR

cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com

O: 303-581-7760, ext. 13

M: 303-827-5164

March 6, 2012

GORILLA LOGIC ANNOUNCES NEW CLOUD-BASED QUALITY AS A SERVICE (QAAS) OFFERING FOR AUTOMATED MOBILE APPLICATION TESTING

New Cloud Service and Testing Platform Automates and Streamlines Mobile App Testing for Improved Time-to-market and Quality

BOULDER, Colo., March 6, 2012 – Gorilla Logic, (www.gorillalogic.com), the leader in enterprise application development and automated mobile testing tools and services, today announced the Gorilla Logic Continuous QA Cloud: the industry’s first Quality as a Service (QaaS) offering that tests and tracks the quality of mobile apps across iPhone, iPad and Android platforms. Together with the latest version of the MonkeyTalk automated testing tool (see today’s announcement entitled “Gorilla Logic Releases MonkeyTalk”), Gorilla Logic now offers enterprises the tools and services needed to leverage a complete “Continuous QA” cycle when developing and deploying high quality mobile applications.

“Functional testing always has been a challenge for Agile development teams, and the new pressures in the mobile app space – shorter schedules, multiple device versions and more complex interactions – are driving teams nuts. Our customers are really seeking innovative solutions that can reduce their cost and time-to-market while improving overall application quality,” explained Ed Schwarz, vice president of engineering and co-founder of Gorilla Logic. “Quality as a Service really cuts the Gordian Knot with an all-new approach that builds upon our years of experience building open source test tools and extending mobile app testing and quality to the cloud.”

With Continuous QA Cloud, enterprises can focus on delivering quality apps to their customers by leveraging a “Quality as a Service” delivery model that eliminates time, cost and expertise barriers associated with QA of mobile applications. Gorilla Logic’s onshore/offshore service delivery model leverages both its U.S. and recently opened Bangalore, India office to provide a price point that represents real value for any serious project team. Processes, tools and expertise combine to provide the kind of reliability and quality teams frequently struggle to achieve – without imposing speed bumps in their Agile process.

The new Gorilla Logic Continuous QA Cloud service provides:

• A revolutionary platform which allows customers to test their apps automatically, on demand, across dozens or hundreds of mobile devices and simulators.
• The power of Gorilla Logic’s industry-leading open-source testing tool – MonkeyTalk (formerly FoneMonkey). MonkeyTalk’s unique capabilities, from easy-to-work with record-playback to sophisticated data-driven test suites, are solving real-world functional testing challenges for mobile app teams worldwide. The latest MonkeyTalk expands these capabilities to include simpler and more powerful scripting and playback across both major mobile app platforms –  iOS and Android.
• QuickStart Services – a no-hassle service offering allows teams to be up and running with QaaS – with real test results in their hands every day – in three weeks without any learning curve or additional staff.

Organizations creating mobile apps today are challenged when it comes to testing, elaborates Schwarz. The field needs support to manage delivery quality in the face of ever-more-demanding consumer audiences, ever-shorter timeframes, and ever-expanding functionality These challenges only increase in the mobile space (gestures, location, direction, hybrid web apps, etc.). Most approaches still center around manual testing in developer desktop environments, assuming infrequent releases at long intervals.  

Schwarz says up to this point, Gorilla Logic’s open source MonkeyTalk (previously FoneMonkey) tools have been the leading innovation to address this issue. But challenges remain: the speed and integration the Agile Projects thrive on have left the QA team underserved. They have had to scramble to do the work of developers, integrators and operators just to make a test environment available, and their tools and integration are still are on the “the wild west/roll your own” model.  

By bringing together an automation toolset focused on QA professionals with a zero-configuration, cloud-based, on-demand test execution and management platform, Gorilla Logic’s Continuous QA Cloud solves these problems without impacting delivery speed or requiring extensive re-tooling or skills acquisition. “We have  spent the last six months bringing together a complete offering – tools, process, expertise and the Gorilla Logic Continuous QA Cloud platform – to really change the game for Agile project teams delivering rich interactive applications – especially the QA teams,” said Stu Stern, CEO and co-founder of Gorilla Logic. “Continuous QA Cloud combines the power of Agile practices, availability of on-demand cloud computing power and the business-point-of-view approach of functional testing in a way which the industry really hasn’t seen before.”

Pricing and Availability

Gorilla Logic’s Continuous QA Cloud Platform service is available immediately, priced based on customer need. For more information please visit (www.gorillalogic.com/quality-service/what-is-qaas). To read CEO Stu Stern’s blog on this announcement please visit (http://blog.gorillalogic.com/).

About Gorilla Logic

Gorilla Logic provides custom enterprise application development services on the ground and in the cloud to many of the world’s leading software-driven organizations. It has a rich history of applying software engineering best practices to reduce the time and cost of delivering high-quality, full-featured applications with advanced functionality. Its technical leadership in mobile, rich Internet and enterprise applications showcases its broad platform expertise and exemplifies its commitment to software development best practices and quality. Gorilla Logic’s innovative work with emerging development platforms led to the creation of two industry leading open source tools for automated testing, MonkeyTalk (iPhone/iPad/Android applications – formerly FoneMonkey), and FlexMonkey (Flex applications). To download Gorilla Logic’s open source tools, and to learn more about the company and its services, please visit (www.gorillalogic.com). 

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October 3, 2011

TASKTOP’S MIK KERSTEN TO SHARE INSIGHTS INTO ALM AUTOMATION AND JAVA BUILD AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION AT JAVAONE 2011

Kersten to outline ALM Automation with Mylyn and Hudson, and moderate panel discussion on the Future of Java Build and Continuous Integration

WHO:             Mik Kersten – CEO and founder of Tasktop Technologies (www.tasktop.com)

Kersten is the creator of the Eclipse Mylyn open source project and inventor of the task-focused interface. At Tasktop he provides the technical vision behind Tasktop Dev for developer productivity and tool integration and Tasktop Sync for enterprise ALM synchronization.

WHAT:           “Future of Java Build and Continuous Integration”

Mon., Oct. 3, 2011, 11 a.m. Pacific in Hotel Nikko – Nikko Ballroom II/III

Not long ago, developers built and deployed Java applications with brittle scripts and builds invoked from developers’ desktops.  Given the complexity of today’s applications and the shift of the deployment destination from data center to cloud, Java build is due for an overhaul.  The increased roles of DevOps, Agile planning and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) are putting new requirements on the automation needed in the modern build stack, while the rapid adoption of Hudson is making clear the central role of Continuous Integration (CI) as the hub of a Java application development and deployment.  This panel will debate approaches to modernizing the build, CI and ALM infrastructure to help scale the productivity of development teams and leverage the latest array of build, test and deployment solutions.

“ALM Automation with Mylyn and Hudson”

Tues., Oct. 4, 2011, noon – 1 p.m. Pacific in Parc 55 – Divisidero

With the shift to PaaS and a new breed of open source ALM tools, the deployment loop of enterprise apps is going through its biggest transition since the creation of Java. Kersten will explore connecting the enterprise Java stack to cloud deployment via task-focused continuous integration based on Hudson. Distributed version control systems, code review and Agile planning, based on the Eclipse Mylyn interoperability platform, can be used to create a new level of connectivity and automation between the team and the running application. This talk outlines a roadmap for transforming productivity by connecting developers’ desktops to the release, and automating all the steps in between, from provisioning the IDE to monitoring the running application.

WHERE:         JavaOne 2011 booth (#5004)

                        San Francisco, CA

INFO:              Tasktop is exhibiting at JavaOne in booth #5004. For more information and to arrange an interview with Mik Kersten please contact Christie Denniston at 303-581-7760 or by email at (cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com).

February 10, 2011

Prediction #6: Continuous integration becomes central to deployment, Jenkins attacks Hudson with a chicken

Prediction #6: Continuous integration becomes central to deployment, Jenkins attacks Hudson with a chicken

by Mik Kersten, February 3rd, 2011

How does a continuous integration (CI) tool named after a butler or two grab such a large market share when much more feature-rich and polished commercial counterparts exist? The naïve answer is that it’s free. If you dig a bit deeper, the success of Hudson can be seen as part of a larger trend in developer-centric application lifecycle tools. A growing number of open source tools have hit the mark in capturing developer collaboration and Agile lifecycle management practices. What has caused these tools to snowball in popularity is the rich ecosystems of extensions that they support. That combination has become lucrative to larger organizations wishing to increase the productivity of their developers. When an open source community starts smelling of money-making potential, a different breed of dog moves in. This can be a very good thing, as it is often the catalyst needed to move the project across the chasm to broad industry adoption.

The challenge for popular open source projects is to create a governance model that marries the interests of the project’s community with those of vendors supporting the project. The most successful open source projects are ones that manage this dichotomy without alienating either party. Spring, JBoss and MySQL won by having a single dedicated vendor managing commercial and community interests. Eclipse and Apache have created governance models that support the overlapping interests of multiple vendors. In the case of Hudson, with Kohsuke’s departure from Oracle, a split formed. In recent blog posts we’ve seen Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of Hudson, highlighting the community and the ecosystem of extensions that have made Hudson successful to date. On the public forums, Oracle’s Ted Farrell has emphasized the importance of versioning, consistency and stability, which are relevant for taking Hudson to the next level of enterprise adoption. Both of these concerns need to be addressed.

Over the coming year, extensible continuous integration is going to play a key role in both on-premise ALM stack modernizations and cloud-hosted ALM solutions. If you have a few grey hairs on your head, this may not sound new or noteworthy. A decade ago, we set up a CI build for AspectJ.org with CruiseControl and Ant and it is still running today. More modern Mylyn CI builds are very similar, but running Hudson and Tycho. What’s interesting is that over the past decade the continuous integration loop has become the underpinning of build automation in the Agile development process. Easy extensibility has made CI servers a convenient hub for plugging a variety of ALM tools into the Agile build loop. We are moving away from a world where realses, code metrics, testing tools and deployment destinations are being configured by each developer within his or her IDE. Instead, the CI server is becoming the hub that holds the authoritative build specs, with developers attaching to the portion of the ALM artefacts that they need to work on for the current release. Testing, quality, and metrics tools will increasingly use the CI server as the place to hook into the development process. In an upcoming prediction, I’ll discuss how combining task-focused workflow with continuous integration will prove to be a convenient abstraction for tool support that facilitates knowledge capture and sharing between Planning, Dev, Ops and QA.

All of this potential means that Hudson is a hot topic, and that Hudson’s consumers are scratching their heads on what to do about the Jenkins fork. Hudson’s success to date comes from the typical mix of passionate community leadership, open source extensibility and a vendor-sponsored marketing investment that helped create that community. The latter is often omitted from developers’ discussions, but now that we are in the later stages of open source maturity, a project’s access to marketing resources has become a key component to success. A case in point is the significant marketing budget of successful open source foundations, or that of the Mozilla Foundation’s, which is in the millions.

In open source, community-centric passions drive projects to their initial critical. Then comes the point at which enterprise support, stability, and the ability for other vendors to invest in a project become relevant. These help a project to graduate from an early adopter community to the pragmatists who can establish an open source project as a de facto standard. For that to happen, a project must be bigger than the cult of personality around its founder, just as any organization must be bigger than its leader to thrive. But with the heart of the contributor community in his hands, and his brain more wired to the technical vision of the project than any other person’s on the planet, the founder is often required to drive major downstream innovations.

In the year ahead, the existing consumers of Hudson will vote with their feet whether to go with the forked Jenkins codebase or with Hudson. The question will largely boil down to how stable the core of Hudson is, and whether upcoming changes to the core of Hudson that happen within Jenkins, and its key extensions, warrant a migration. In the closer-knit community there will be a tendency to Jenkins, as represented two hundred community votes, the majority of which were in favour of the fork. But in the much larger end-user community the default will be resistance to change in the absence of major and clear value add to making the move. We’ve seen this on Eclipse with the overly slow migration of many plug-ins to e4, which brings incremental value add and only benefit.

The large and more conservative consumers of Hudson will look to which corporate sponsor, Oracle for Hudson and the CloudBees startup for Jenkins, is providing better long-term assurance for their build infrastructure investment. There will be questions about Jenkins’ promise of neutrality. In the past, genuine open source project neutrality has only been achieved by large open source foundations with sufficiently diverse funding sources, and even then with mixed success. As such, while Jenkins is likely to see activity, Oracle’s Hudson is unlikely to go away and I predict that it will continue to be a major target of CI deployments through the year.

In the interim, as with the Emacs vs. XEmacs fork of the 90s, there will be some confusion and annoyance from those less interested in the drama. Thankfully John Ferguson Smart wrote his Continuous Integration with Hudson book in open source fashion, making it easier to refactor. If the divergence between the two projects is sufficient to fragment and fracture the community, there could be a large enough gap for a new open source CI system to join the scene, but it would take time for it to build up momentum. In the meantime, the usual API-level federation layer is likely to form so that plug-ins can support both tools, and we’re invariably going to be asked to create one in Mylyn. Most of the internet associates the name Jenkins with a certain Leeroy who went into a World of Warcraft battle wielding little more than an attitude and a chicken. I hope that in this battle less damage is done to the consumers of this otherwise winning CI technology.

For more blog entries by Mik Kersten or Tasktop Technologies, please visit: (http://tasktop.com/blog/).

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