Catapult Public Relations

COLLABNET ADDS GIT SOURCE CODE MANAGEMENT TO CODESION ENTERPRISE CLOUD DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:30:14 +0000

IT organizations using multiple source code tools now have a single, enterprise-grade hosting platform that offers the flexibility and cost-savings of cloud development

BRISBANE, Calif., Dec. 14, 2011 â�� CollabNetÂ® (www.collab.net), the global leader for enterprise cloud development and Agile ALM products and services, today announced that the Git source code management (SCM) tool is now available as a fully hosted, enterprise-grade solution directly from its Codesion cloud development platform. This cloud-enabled version of Git follows the companyâ��s recent launch of CollabNet Connectâ�¢ that made Git available as an integrated tool within the TeamForgeÂ® Agile ALM platform. Both options make Git a viable choice for enterprise IT organizations where the highest standards in support, security, availability and back-up are a â��mustâ�� requirement.

â��The continued convergence and adoption of open source and commercial ALM tools within cloud development platforms requires new levels of assurance for both performance and security,â�� said Guy Marion, vice president of CollabNet Cloud Services. â��Now development teams working on mission-critical projects have access to Git within a highly secure, reliable and enterprise-grade cloud development environment that includes other popular SCM tools, such as Subversion, and leading ALM solutions.â��

Many IT organizations find that development teams use a wide range of both open source and commercial SCM and ALM tools. With Git now available on Codesion, organizations can deploy and manage Git, Subversion and other SCM tools â��under one roof,â�� with code stored in a single, secure, enterprise-ready location. For enterprise customers managing hundreds of projects across multiple tool stacks, Codesion now offers both integrated SCM hosting along with access to a growing suite of development tools, including: Trac, BugZilla and CollabNetâ��s ScrumWorksÂ® Â Pro and TeamForge for Agile ALM, and Codesion Publisher for software deployment.

CollabNet is the first company to provide a cloud-enabled platform to govern and secure development with the Git DVCS tool, such as for mobile application development. Enterprises can now take advantage of the speed and flexibility provided by Git without compromising corporate standards for compliance, security or management efficiency â�� all in the cloud.

To trial the new version of Git hosted on Codesion please visit (http://Codesion.com/free-trial)

Â About CollabNet

CollabNet is the recognized leader in enterprise cloud development and Agile ALM, with more than 7,000 global customers that range from single workgroups to large enterprises. Its deep open source roots include the creation of Subversion (now formally known as Apache SubversionÂ®), the industry leading version control system with millions of users. CollabNet helps enterprise customers build and deploy better software through its focus on collaboration, enterprise Agile methods and cloud development and computing. Many CollabNet customers improve productivity by as much as 70 percent, while reducing costs by 80 percent. Its solutions include TeamForgeÂ®, the industry-leading Agile ALM platform for distributed development, ScrumWorksÂ® Pro for Agile project management, Subversion Edge for managed source code management, Codesion for cloud-based development and deployment, and a range of Agile-based training, consulting and transformation services. For more information, please visit (www.collab.net).

# # #

CollabNet, TeamForge, and ScrumWorks are registered trademarks of CollabNet, Inc.Â Codesion is a trademark of CollabNet, Inc.Â SubversionÂ® is a registered trademark of the Apache Software Foundation.Â Other names may be trademarks of their respective holders.

Media Contact:

Christie Denniston

Catapult PR-IR

O: (303) 581-7760

M: (303) 827-5164

cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com

COLLABNET LAUNCHES COLLABNET CONNECT™ FOR FEDERATED APPLICATION DELIVERY ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE CLOUD

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:58:25 +0000

New integration framework delivers change management hub by connecting commercial and open source ALM tools â�� brings Git to the enterprise BRISBANE, Calif., Nov. 30, 2011 â�� CollabNetÂ® (www.collab.net), the global leader in enterprise cloud development and Agile ALM, today announced CollabNet Connectâ�¢, a new integration framework for its TeamForgeÂ® ALM platform. It enables customers to orchestrate and govern application delivery processes across commercial and open source ALM and cloud development tools. In addition to integrations with leading ALM tools like HP Application Lifecycle Management platform and JIRA, CollabNet Connect also brings the Git open source version control tool into an enterprise-grade ALM platform. The Git integration provides users complete freedom of development approach, while simultaneously providing, for the first time, enterprise-grade Git governance and consistency of lifecycle practices for coding practices, release standards and IP reuse. CollabNet will host a free webinar on Jan. 12, 2012, to share insights into ALM interoperability, change management approaches and how IT organizations can accelerate application delivery through Continuous Delivery and DevOps practices. Participants include CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli, Forrester vice president Dave West and Michael Loetzsch, transition manager from Deutsche Post. To register please visit: (www.collab.net/almplus). â��As software delivery becomes a strategic business process, ALM strategies must keep pace with business needs. Modern development teams need a platform that supports diverse and fast-changing requirements for tools, technologies and processes,â�� said Bill Portelli, co-founder and CEO of CollabNet. â��CollabNet Connect addresses that need, providing a complete â��change management hubâ�� for IT enterprises that require central governance without locking customers into rigid software tools, repositories and configurations. Our approach is completely unique in that third-party tools can integrate natively to the TeamForge environment, both from a look and feel, as well as from a lifecycle traceability perspective.â�� Software development and delivery processes, along with associated tool sets, continue to evolve and change with the mainstream adoption of Agile and DevOps practices. As a result, large and distributed organizations are struggling to gain cohesive visibility, traceability and automation from its growing assortment of commercial and open source tools, resulting in â��siloedâ�� practices and limited collaboration. CollabNet Connect with TeamForge accelerates enterprise software delivery by providing development and IT operations teams with a cross-functional, fully integrated governance platform to share and track ALM artifacts, and allow stakeholders to work collaboratively in the tools of their choice â�� on-premise or in the cloud. Bringing Git to the enterprise, CollabNet is the first major ALM vendor to provide a comprehensive platform to govern and secure development with the Git DVCS tool, such as for mobile application development. Enterprises can now join more than 1,000 TeamForge users and take advantage of the speed and flexibility provided by the Git tool, without compromising corporate standards for compliance, security or management efficiency. Also unique in the industry, CollabNet, the founder of the Subversion open source project (now formally known as Apache SubversionÂ®), allows TeamForge projects to use CollabNet Subversion, Git or both SCM environments. Find out more at (www.collab.net/go/Git). In addition, developers can achieve increased productivity by connecting their point tools to an enterprise framework for collaboration, automation and IP discovery and reuse. Tools like Atlassian JIRA now become â��first class citizensâ�� in an enterprise ALM platform, gaining instant access to features for enterprise scalability, traceability and artifact discovery across multiple JIRA instances, and access to corporate templates for consistent software delivery processes. Find out more at (www.collab.net/go/JIRA). Benefits of CollabNet Connect include: â�¢ GUI Integration â�� Incorporates the third-party tools natively into TeamForge as a â��first class citizen.â�� â�¢ Lifecycle Traceability â�� Extends traceability for applications with uniquely identifiable elements (e.g. work items, requirements, tests, etc.) making these elements universally available through TeamForge associations for end-to-end traceability. â�¢ Workflow Extension â�� Extends workflow for applications that need to subscribe, modify or respond to TeamForge transactions, allowing enterprises to implement workflows that cross conventional tool boundaries. â�¢ Collaboration Extension â�� Enables enterprise-grade software and highly collaborative delivery processes across diverse and changing technology stacks and development clouds. â�¢ Tool-chain Visibility â�� Provides unprecedented visibility across software delivery processes, resulting in software release productivity gains through IP sharing and coordination. â�¢ Search Integration â�� Allows ALM stakeholders across the enterprise to search, discover and share artifacts and documents across workgroups and locations, no matter what tools are used. â�¢ Governance Extension â�� Empowers developers to work with the tools they want without compromising any corporate governance mandates. â��ALM is not dead â�� it has become ALM 2.0+.â�� writes Dave West, vice president and Research Director in the October 2010 Forrester Research Inc. report: The Time Is Right For ALM 2.0+. â��ALM 2.0+ tools and strategies accept tool and platform heterogeneity, imposing a boundary above practitioner tools and encouraging ALM to interact with those tools in the context of work and harvest information for traceability, reporting, and management.â�� The TeamForge and CollabNet Connect solution provides: â�¢ Empowerment of developers while, at the same time, enterprise visibility and governance of standards and data of disparate point tools. â�¢ The ability to overcome JIRA scalability issues by providing a framework into which separate JIRA servers may be incorporated using the TeamForge services distribution capabilities. â�¢ A mechanism to create repeatable processes using the TeamForge ALM Process template to create standards for siloâ��d teams that are configuring tools. â�¢ IP reuse to help companies align individual and inconsistently configured point tools into a set of enterprise standards. Availability CollabNet Connect will be available through the release of TeamForge 6.1.1. More information and download instructions can be found at (http://www.collab.net/products/collabnetconnect/). About CollabNet CollabNet is the recognized leader in enterprise Cloud development, powering global software development for more than 7,000 companies, from workgroups to enterprises. As the company that spawned from deep open source roots with the sponsoring of industry-leading Subversion, we are dedicated to leveraging collaboration, Agile methods, and Cloud computing to transform the way software development organizations develop and deploy applications, in their cloud or ours. Through this transformation, CollabNet clients have recognized improved productivity by up to 70 percent and reduced their cost of software development by up to 80 percent due to the implementation of highly Agile and enterprise-wide collaborative and distributed techniques. Our solutions include TeamForgeÂ®, the industry-leading Agile ALM platform for distributed developers, the Codesion cloud hosting and integration platform, ScrumWorksÂ® Pro Agile project management, Subversion Edge for managed SCM, and Agile training and transformation services. For more information, please visit www.collab.net. ### CollabNet, TeamForge, and ScrumWorks are registered trademarks of CollabNet, Inc. Codesion is a trademark of CollabNet, Inc. SubversionÂ® is a registered trademark of the Apache Software Foundation. Other names may be trademarks of their respective holders. Media Contact: Christie Denniston Catapult PR-IR O: (303) 581-7760 M: (303) 827-5164 cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com

TASKTOP EXPERTS TO PRESENT MULTIPLE CONFERENCE SESSIONS AT ECLIPSECON EUROPE 2011

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:58:33 +0000

Tasktop continues to support the Eclipse community through thought leadership and sharing of best practices

WHO: Steffen Pingel â�� Senior Software Engineer, Tasktop Technologies

Benjamin Muskalla â�� Software Engineer, Tasktop Technologies

(www.tasktop.com)

Tasktop Technologies is the company behind the Eclipse Mylyn ALM integration framework and innovative task-focused interface. It provides desktop and enterprise-grade solutions that improve productivity, collaboration and Agile ALM success. Muskalla and Pingel will present the following sessions at EclipseCon Europe 2011.

WHAT: Experiences from Migrating Mylyn to Git and Tycho

November 2, 16:30 - 17:00

Steffen Pingel

Benjamin Muskalla

Until the recent restructuring of Mylyn, numerous committers and contributors have evolved its source code for more than six years in a single CVS module relying on a monolithic command-line driven PDE build, understood by one committer, executable on a single machine. Step-by-step the project was modularized, the build was migrated to Tycho and sources were moved into Git. Hudson jobs now execute on each commit and reproducible releases can be triggered by anyone. This talk highlights decisions taken and discusses lessons learned. Attendees will get an overview of Mylyn's build system, with a focus on knowledge that attendees can apply to their own project.

What the heck are logical models?

Benjamin Muskalla

November 3, 16:00 - 16:30

Did you ever break the code or your models in your SCM? Giving the complexity of today's software systems, physical files are not the only asset in your version control system. During this session Muskalla will give an overview of how Logical Models can better manage the complexity of their systems and how plugin developers can leverage the functionality the Platform provides.

Pimp your Productivity with Git, Gerrit, Hudson and Mylyn

November 4, 10:30 - 11:30

Steffen Pingel

Benjamin Muskalla

The Git distributed versioning system is being increasingly adopted by the developer community. Using Git for version control makes Gerrit the natural choice for code reviews. Besides source code, requirements and build artifacts play an important role in the development cycles that are now often managed in Hudson and Bugzilla. This session will demonstrate how the tools available within the Mylyn project work together to seamlessly integrate development artifacts in Eclipse, while providing traceability all the way from requirement to the final merge into the production branch.

Task-focused modeling with Mylyn, EMF and Papyrus

November 4, 13:30 - 14:00

Benjamin Muskalla

To bring the productivity benefits of the task-focused interface to engineers using Eclipse-based modeling technologies, Mylyn created a â��Context Bridgeâ�� for EMF-based models and diagram editors. The result is a focused mode for diagrams that shows only the elements related to the task-at-hand. This session showcases the use of the task-focused interface within the Ecore Tools and the Papyrus UML Editor. In addition, it outlines the aspects of bringing the task-focused interface to model and diagram editors, and provides a quick overview of how to enable these for each diagram type.

WHERE: EclipseCon Europe 2011, Nov 2-4, Ludwigsburg, Germany

(http://eclipsecon.org/)

INFO: For more information or to arrange an interview with Steffen Pingel or Benjamin Muskalla, please contact Christie Denniston at +1 303-581-7760 or by email at (cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com).

Prediction #3: Git and distributed version control invade the enterprise, widespread panic and benefits follow

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:55:58 +0000

Prediction #3: Git and distributed version control invade the enterprise, widespread panic and benefits follow

by Mik Kersten, February 23rd, 2011

Three years ago, in his presentation on the Git Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS), Linus Torvalds provoked developers by declaring that "if you actually like using CVS... you should be in some mental institution." Since then, awareness of and discussion around both DVCS and mental health have grown rapidly. For many considering a migration to DVCS, discussions of trade-offs are filling coffee breaks. After the first migration steps are taken, the conversations get more heated and circle around getting DVCS best practices under control. For teams and organizations modernizing their ALM stack, this year will involve deciding whether to begin moving to a DVCS system. This post discusses the fundamental benefits that DVCS will bring to your Agile ALM stack, and identifies the gaps in tools and best practices that need to be addressed in order to avoid having the inmates get overly annoyed with the management of their asylum.

In 2009, the Eclipse Community Survey showed that 20% of respondents used CVS and 58% used Subversion (SVN), with CVS coming in at 24% for companies over 5,000 employees. While DVCS usage has been growing, the portion claimed by CVS and SVN has also grown in the 2010 survey. The mental model of CVS and SVN is entrenched for the average enterprise developer and builds on decades of the knowledge, tools and best practices that have built up around centralized version control. Tools built on top of CVS and SVN, such as the Eclipse and Mylyn team support, have also modernized these dated protocols and servers. But what the rapid rise of Git in open source has made clear is the limitations of traditional file-based change tracking and the centralized model for commit access control. The current adoption rate of Git is sufficient evidence that DVCS works and scales for open source development. The question then turns to how those benefits can be realized by your teams and organizations.

The key benefit of DVCS is that the collaboration rules and conventions captured by the version control system align with the trust network that forms organically between developers. The centralized version control model relies on component boundaries and restrictions on committer rights for managing the division of labour required for software configuration management (SCM) of complex systems. This perspective falls into the same trap as thinking that a modular, object-oriented decomposition of software is sufficient to manage the complexity of a large system. It is not. Dependency injection, aspect-oriented and declarative programming are key components of the modern programming model. In other words, concerns that crosscut the hierarchical decomposition of any large system need to be captured in order to evolve the implementation of that system effectively.

Tasks, whether in the form of user stories, features or defect fixes, are what define the planning and lifecycle management of large applications. Tasks crosscut the system's modularity by capturing the discussions between developers and end users around the software, not the API and component boundaries of the software. Aggregations of tasks into user stories, plans and releases drive the evolution of the software over time and define the boundaries that naturally form between developers. Centralized version control systems have focused entirely on changes and components, and ignored this more social dimension of coding. Managing a large system meant breaking a system into components and managing access control with commit rights. This aligned version control with the system's modularity, not with the way that developers work on the system in terms of experimenting with and collaborating on changes to the system. The crosscutting nature of developer collaboration and review activities needed to be captured and facilitated, and DVCS provides us just that.

In the video above, a visualization of directory structure corresponds to the modularity of the open Mylyn project. After watching the video for a few moments, we see that the activity of the developers themselves layers on top of the software's modularity and has a structure of its own. This structure corresponds to the tasks, change sets and patch reviews done by the Mylyn committers. By facilitating the common operations needed to support this workflow between developers, such as task-based branching and merging, DVCS changes the game by making it easy for developers to capture their activity within the SCM system itself rather than tracking it through external tools, or not capturing it at all. By expressing the collaboration, review and trust patterns common with open source developers, DVCS has fundamentally transformed SCM.

That's the good news. The bad news is that it will take the better part of this decade for many organizations to consume the benefits of DVCS. That timeframe may seem pessimistic given that some large organizations are already in the midst of deploying Git and Mercurial. But DVCS is a discontinuous innovation. It both provides a transformational benefit over centralized version control and requires a fundamental shift in developer practices that previously used a considerably simpler model. Consider the introduction of object-oriented programming (OOP). The core ideas were already baked in the 1970s, but it took decades and truckloads of books to turn the ideas into a scalable development practice in the enterprise. OOP introduced polymorphism and type hierarchies, neither of which supported the older style search and grep-based code navigation. A whole new breed of tool support needed to be created in order for developers to get a handle on navigating OOP system structure.

While the switch from centralized to distributed version control is a smaller paradigm shift than the switch from procedural to object-oriented programming, the scope of the change should not be underestimated. Problems will arise in three categories. First, the mental switch required from the average developer, accustomed to committing to the main line of the code with branches being few and far between, will be a source of friction and costly in terms of developer training. Second, tool support for discontinuous integrations tends to lag the initial deployments. For the near future, developers accustomed to full-featured graphical or IDE-based clients will find themselves back in the command-line when working with Git and Mercurial. Those with some muscle memory for command-line version control operations will still need to retrain their brains, since Git's command line options are more complex. Finally, the biggest challenge organizations adopting DVCS in 2011 will face is a lack of clear best practices. If you are launching a new project with the social dynamics of the Linux Kernel, you're all set and don't need to look beyond the best practices that Linus has forged. But if you are a medium or large organization, you will need to define the various practices around branching, merging, rebasing, reviewing and staging that are needed to effectively map tools like Git onto your development processes. The higher complexity of DVCS introduces a broader variability of best practices. Today we are using different Git practices for developing the Mylyn and the Tasktop codebases.

Organizations pushing the bleeding edge of Git adoption will discover that these problems cascade. Neither the change in developer mind-set nor best practices are encapsulated by the Git tool support available today. This means that many developers will struggle to get a handle on needing to gain a sufficient level of Git expertise and best practices, and these will have to be learned individually rather than being captured in the repeatable process provided by tool support. That approach scales to a few dozen motivated developers, but much less so with a few thousand. The top technical people at these organizations will invariably push for DVCS migration, provided they see the fundamental productivity benefits as attainable. But until DVCS is further along the technology adoption lifecycle, for most organizations the move must be made stepwise, starting with non-core and greenfield projects establishing the best practices and conventions. On Tasktop and Mylyn development we have migrated 1/5th and 1/3rd of the codebases respectively, allowing ourselves time to refine the best practices suitable for each of those, and add the EGit support needed for our developers and contributors to be productive.

By architecting version control around the social structure of the software development process, distributed version control has aligned the Agile and task-focused planning process with the versioning and change operations that we use to manage our software's history. Since both the task-focused and the DVCS movement have focused on the natural cadence of coding and developer collaboration, there has been convergent evolution between tools like Mylyn and Git. In the not-too distant future, the developer will activate a task, the appropriate Gerrit change or topic branch will be created, stashed when the task is deactivated, and a continuous integration build for the topic branch spun up, with failures percolated back to the developer's desktop as updates to the task. As DVCS best practices evolve, we will see more of this natural mirroring between the Agile planning loop and the DVCS mechanisms converging, lined up with tool-supported best practices.

Successful open source projects have a community and contribution driven planning loop, and can already reap the benefits of DVCS. But the enterprise software planning loop is more complex. In his dogmatic focus on open source software, when proclaiming that everyone using centralized version control was insane, Linus ignored the work required to bring the benefits of open source technologies to the software development community at large. The average developer's training needs to be accounted for, best practices for incorporating DVCS into the planning loop must be defined, and tool-based automation is needed to bridge the gaps.

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