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March 15, 2012
TASKTOP’S MIK KERSTEN TO KEYNOTE AT ECLIPSECON 2012 ON THE IMPACT OF OPEN SOURCE PRACTICES ON ENTERPRISE AND AGILE ALM
Beyond the impact of open source tools is the emergence of new collaboration and workflow practices that are shaping how software is built
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 desktop-based developer productivity and Tasktop Sync for enterprise ALM synchronization.
WHAT: The Future of ALM: Developing in the Social Code Graph
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is transforming before us. A new breed of tool-supported open source practices is reshaping the ALM landscape and making software delivery the most transparent and connected knowledge work process. During this keynote, Kersten will explore this transformation, show how it will impact software development in the next decade and illustrate how today’s developers are helping to shape the digital workplace of tomorrow.
Just as the world changed when social networking tools made it trivial for us to externalize our relationships and activity streams, a new collection of open source ALM tools has made it easy for developers to go far beyond dumping code into SCM. Developers are now externalizing their collaboration practices and workflows into a loosely coupled social code graph connected by tasks and relationships.
WHERE: EclipseCon 2012
Hyatt Regency Reston
Grand Ballroom DEFG
1800 Presidents St.
Reston, VA 20190
WHEN: Thurs., March 29, 9 – 10 a.m. EST
CONTACT: For more information on Tasktop Technologies, or to arrange an interview with Mik Kersten please contact Christie Denniston at 303-581-7760 or at (cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com).
Tags: agile
alm
eclipsecon
mik kersten
mylyn
pr
tasktop
December 1, 2011
TASKTOP’S MIK KERSTEN PRESENTS WEBINAR ON MODERNIZING ALM ARCHITECTURE WITH TASKTOP SYNC
Webinar provides in-depth overview of Tasktop Sync 2.0
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: Modernize Your ALM Architecture with Tasktop Sync 2.0
In this must-see webinar, Tasktop CEO Mik Kersten will provide the first in-depth view of Tasktop Sync 2.0. The latest version of Tasktop Sync 2.0 provides a set of industry-first facilities for connecting an ALM stack. Kersten will highlight the new features of Sync 2.0 which connect all stakeholders with real-time traceability and collaboration.
The webinar will conclude with a conceptual overview of Tasktop’s Task Federation™ technologies and best practices for connecting and modernizing the ALM stack, from business analyst to developer. An overview of what’s new in Tasktop Dev 2.2 will show attendees how to bring this new connectivity and traceability to developers. For example, Tasktop Dev 2.2 builds on HP’s Application Lifecycle Intelligence feature to provide instant workspace provisioning for developers using Eclipse. No matter what mix of developer, QA, Agile and requirements management tools, Tasktop Sync and Tasktop Dev empower developers and other stakeholders to use the tools that make them most productive while ensuring that the ALM artifacts are automatically and seamlessly connected to ease collaboration, reporting and traceability.
WHEN: Tue., Dec. 6 – 9 – 10 a.m. PST
INFO: To register for this webinar please visit: (http://tinyurl.com/6lsj8zs). Updates from the webinar will be available by following the live Twitter feed at #TaskSync. To learn more about Tasktop Sync please visit (http://www.tasktop.com/sync). To arrange an interview with Mik Kersten please contact Christie Denniston at 303-581-7760 or by email at (cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com).
November 28, 2011
TASKTOP TECHNOLOGIES NEW SYNC 2.0 PROVIDES ALM ARCHITECTURE MAPPING AND APPLICATION LIFECYCLE LINKING VIA OSLC
Tasktop continues to bring order and increased productivity from disparate and disconnected Agile ALM tool stacks within enterprise IT organizations
VANCOUVER , BC Nov. 28, 2011 – Tasktop Technologies (www.tasktop.com), creators of Eclipse Mylyn and a global leader in ALM integration and developer tools, today announced Tasktop Sync 2.0, the latest version of its Task Federation™ platform that allows IT organizations to synchronize existing ALM servers from multiple vendors and open source projects. Tasktop Sync 2.0 makes it even easier for administrators to manage their ALM synchronizations through powerful visual tools and extends integration support via change management artifact linking via the Open Services for Lifecycle Management (OSLC) interoperability protocols.
“Complex sourcing has become the norm for most companies – including off-shoring and open source – and deployment across a multitude of platforms, such as mobile, embedded, cloud and on-premise, drives software development challenges,” said Melinda Ballou, program director for IDC’s Application lifecycle Management (ALM) service. “In this context, lack of coordination across lifecycle management phases and automation undermines business innovation and agility. Companies urgently need ways to effectively connect a broad range of lifecycle tools to enable visibility, metrics and control.”
Tasktop Sync is built on the industry-standard Eclipse Mylyn ALM interoperability framework to provide real-time synchronization, automatic and configurable conflict resolution, and support for more than two dozen ALM tools. It unifies heterogeneous ALM stacks by allowing developers, testers, business analysts and managers to work within their best-of-breed tools of choice, while automatically maintaining traceability across ALM artifacts. Built on the company’s Task Federation™ technology, Tasktop Sync brings task federation to ALM servers, by providing the only real-time, bi-directional and fully automated synchronization between ALM servers. The company’s Tasktop Dev product line supports Tasktop Sync by federating tasks and other ALM artifacts on the developer’s Eclipse and Visual Studio desktops.
“Medium and large organizations’ ALM stacks have become so diverse and disconnected that the lack of traceability and cross-stakeholder collaboration has become the bottleneck of large-scale software delivery,” said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop and creator of the open source Eclipse Mylyn project. “Tasktop has spearheaded a new approach to connecting stakeholders in the application lifecycle, making it possible to capture an organization’s ALM architecture in a single tool and deliver real-time connectivity and traceability across a wide variety of open source, commercial and legacy ALM systems.” (To read Mik Kersten’s blog post on this announcement please visit: (http://tasktop.com/blog/news/tasktop-sync-2-0-released)
Tasktop Sync 2.0 includes several innovations for connecting ALM stacks and stakeholders. It provides new visual tools that allow ALM architects and administrators to connect to ALM repositories, conduct introspective analysis of repository schemas and intelligently connect previously disconnected tools via ALM artifact mappings. In addition to artifact synchronization, Tasktop Sync 2.0 provides a new software lifecycle artifact linking facility built on the OSLC ALM interoperability protocols to serve as a broker for linking ALM artifacts
Based on Tasktop’s continued collaboration with IBM to define the OSLC protocols, Tasktop Sync 2.0 provides OSLC-based REST API access to more than 20 Tasktop Certified™ Mylyn connectors as well as dozens of other community-driven or in-house Mylyn connectors. For example, organization using IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) tools in the ALM stack, such as Rational Team Concert and Rational Requirements Composer, can now link with artifacts from a broad range of third-party and open-source ALM tools, such as HP ALM and Quality Center, Atlassian JIRA and Mozilla Bugzilla. OSLC linking extends Tasktop Sync’s synchronization facilities to support live connectivity and embedding of ALM artifacts in a similar way that social networking tools can embed each other’s feeds (e.g., Twitter within Facebook).
New Features in Tasktop Sync 2.0 include:
• Sync Quick start wizard to dramatically reduce the time to set up the first synchronization.
• Visual editor for configuring synchronization mappings.
• Fine-grained and automated conflict resolution and handling.
• Full support for custom fields, rich text and wiki transformations, attachments and user mappings.
• Synchronization support for all common ALM artifacts, including defects, tasks, work items, test summaries and requirements.
• Unlimited mappings and repositories to connect large-scale ALM stacks with numerous servers and tools.
• Bi-directional synchronization of task associations, ALM artifact hierarchies, and complex fields
• Groovy-based scripting support for complex field transformations.
• For IBM CLM users, full support for IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) synchronization rules and mappings, allowing administrators to update mappings within RTC.
In addition, Tasktop announced the availability of Tasktop Dev 2.2 that brings new connectivity for developers using HP ALM and Quality Center. Tasktop Dev 2.2 builds on HP’s Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI) feature to provide instant workspace provisioning for developers using Eclipse. Now, developers can simply connect to a release in HP ALM, and Tasktop’s Task Federation facilities load into the workspace the SCM and Continuous Integration (CI) artifacts needed to work on the release, for example, source code from Subversion or builds from Hudson/Jenkins. Tasktop Dev 2.2 also extends HP ALI traceability automation to ClearCase.
Availability
Tasktop Sync 2.0 and Tasktop Dev 2.2 are both available for download tomorrow. Tasktop Sync is offered through perpetual licenses with annual support and maintenance, or annual subscriptions. As a limited-time introductory offer, Tasktop Sync is available as a bundle with Tasktop Dev (Enterprise Edition) for $199 per user, per year. More information is available at (http://tasktop.com/sync).
About Tasktop Technologies
Tasktop Technologies aims to transform 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. The company’s 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 visit http://tasktop.com
# # #
Media Contact:
Christie Denniston
Catapult PR-IR
O: 303-581-7760, ext. 13
M: 303-827-5164
November 17, 2011
TASKTOP’S MIK KERSTEN TO OUTLINE AGILE ALM STRATEGIES WITH HP’S RAZIEL TABIB AT HP DISCOVER VIENNA 2011
Development professionals will learn how to manage the increasingly complex and heterogeneous set of tools and processes that make up today’s ALM practices
WHO: Mik Kersten – CEO and founder, Tasktop Technologies (www.tasktop.com)
Raziel Tabib – product line manager, Software, HP
WHAT: Managing Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Strategies
The reality of today’s development world is agility; speed and time to market are no longer a luxury but are essential ingredients to maintaining market leadership. Organizations have to move fast and embrace changes without any compromise on quality. In order to execute successfully on such goals, organizational process and culture will need to adjust. During this session, Kersten and Tabib will outline and demonstrate how HP and Tasktop provide development managers with visibility and traceability across heterogeneous tools, processes and technologies to address challenges and provide best practices for organizations. Wherever development teams are located and whatever tools or technologies they work with, HP ALM solutions can serve as a single system of record, providing development managers with the intelligence they need to increase quality and shorten release cycles.
WHEN: Thurs., Dec. 1, 2011 – 12:30 p.m. CET
WHERE: HP Discover 2011
Vienna, Austria
INFO: 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).
November 4, 2011
TASKTOP’S MIK KERSTEN TO OUTLINE OPEN SOURCE APPROACHES TO ENTERPRISE AGILE AT AGILE BEST PRACTICES CONFERENCE EAST
Many facets of open source development that align with dynamics and challenges of enterprise Agile processes can be leveraged by development teams
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: “Ten Great Practices Learned from Open Source Projects”
Open source development combines distributed teams, resource constraints and an overload of end-user input. Despite these challenges, the velocity of many popular open source projects is measurably higher than that of their enterprise counterparts. The time has come to take the lessons learned from open source and adapt them to enterprise Agile. Kersten begins with an examination of successful open source projects and their approaches to Agile delivery. He will then outline the overlap of open source approaches and Agile methods, identifying 10 great practices that Agile practitioners can apply to improve their collaboration and productivity. Each practice is grounded in empirical data that Kersten collected from public open source websites. To provide an intuitive appreciation for the open style of Agile delivery, he will illustrate with graphics and visual aids how open source collaboration evolves and grows over time. Attendees will learn novel strategies for connecting the Lean/Agile methodologies and open source development for large-scale enterprise projects.
WHEN: Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2011, 2:30 p.m. Eastern
WHERE: Agile Development Practices Conference East
Rosen Centre Hotel, Orlando, FL
INFO: For more information or to arrange an interview with Mik Kersten please contact Christie Denniston at 303-581-7760 or by email at (cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com).
Tags: agile
alm
mik kersten
open source
SQE
tasktop
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).
September 27, 2011
TASKTOP’S MIK KERSTEN PRESENTS WEBINAR ON DEPLOYING TASKTOP SYNC TO UNIFY HETEROGENEOUS ALM STACKS
Webinar outlines how enterprise software organizations can integrate and synchronize heterogeneous ALM stacks to remove silos and improve collaboration and productivity
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: Synchronizing the ALM Stack for Enterprise Development Webinar
In modern application development and delivery, heterogeneous best-of-breed ALM stacks have become the norm. Driven by open source, outsourcing, remote development and testing, Agile tools, IT decentralization, and in larger organizations, mergers and acquisitions, tool fragmentation is here to stay. In today’s competitive environment, there is little incentive for software vendors to provide more than check-box integration solutions, making it nearly impossible for organizations to gain traceability and visibility – from requirements to source code. During this webinar, Kersten will outline successful strategies and demonstrate how Tasktop Sync solves these challenges. He will show how Tasktop Sync connects development, QA, and Agile project management together through its industry-standard Eclipse Mylyn ALM integration framework. Unlike previous approaches to ALM synchronization, Tasktop Sync provides real-time synchronization, automated conflict resolution and support for more than two dozen ALM systems. Building on Tasktop’s Task FederationTM technology, Tasktop Sync ensures that each stakeholder has access to the data that they need within their tool of choice.
WHEN: Wed., Sept 28, 9 – 10 a.m. PST
INFO: To register for this webinar please visit: (http://tinyurl.com/3o4a5dw). Updates from the webinar will be available by following the live Twitter feed at #TaskSync. To learn more about Tasktop Sync please visit (http://www.tasktop.com/sync). To arrange an interview with Mik Kersten please contact Christie Denniston at 303-581-7760 or by email at cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com.
May 3, 2011
TASKTOP EXECUTIVES TO KEYNOTE AND PRESENT AT JAX 2011
TASKTOP EXECUTIVES TO KEYNOTE AND PRESENT AT JAX 2011
In keynote, Kersten to explore Continuous Integration and how cloud computing is creating a shift in software development and lifecycle management
WHO: Mik Kersten
CEO of Tasktop Technologies
Creator of the open source Eclipse Mylyn project
Tasktop Technologies
www.tasktop.com
Steffen Pingel
Senior Software Developer
Tasktop Technologies
www.tasktop.com
Benjamin Muskalla
Software Developer
Tasktop Technologies
www.tasktop.com
WHAT: The following presentations will be given at JAX 2011
Keynote – Mik Kersten
Task-focused Continuous Integration: Bringing Code to Cloud and Back Again
(May 3, 2011 – 8:15 p.m. – 9 p.m.)
The deployment destination for enterprise applications is going through its biggest transition since the creation of Java. Cloud infrastructure is changing the game for both application deployment and lifecycle management. Over the past decade, open source technologies such as Spring and Tomcat have defined how we build and run enterprise Java applications. Recent developments in open source collaboration Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools are now transforming how we evolve and manage those applications.
Kersten will explore connecting enterprise Java stack with cloud deployment via a task-focused continuous integration loop. The SCM, code review, and Agile ALM technologies, based on the Eclipse Mylyn ALM interoperability platform, will be used to demonstrate how to achieve this new level of connectivity and automation between the team and the application. The talk will conclude with a roadmap of how we can apply these new lessons to define the next decade of enterprise Java productivity.
Q & A: State of Continuous Integration – Mik Kersten
(May 4, 2011 – 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.)
The latest changes in the Hudson/Jenkins case cause quite a stir. But how important are these changes for Continuous Integration? What is the technical roadmap? Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Steffen Schluff, Mik Kersten and Björn Feustel will give some advice and answer your questions.
Git, Gerrit, Hudson and one Mylyn to Rule Them All – Steffen Pingel and Benjamin Muskalla
(May 5, 2011 – 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.)
Git, Gerrit and Hudson are being increasingly adopted. While these tools enable exciting improvements for developers, learning how to push, pull and fetch can be daunting. For tasks, Mylyn already streamlines workflow by providing first-class integration with the IDE. The recent project restructuring now enables the same integrated workflows for code reviews, builds and version control systems.
Mylyn 3.6: Agile, ALM and Task-Focused Continuous Integration – Mik Kersten
(May 5, 2011 – 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.)
A decade ago, heavyweight ALM tools did more to impede developers than to support collaboration. With the move to Agile methodologies, the time has come to embrace lightweight collaboration and social coding tools to increase our velocity. For many Java developers, Mylyn has become the tool of choice for connecting team communication with coding. In 2010, Mylyn became a top-level Eclipse project and grew to support the entire Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) stack. This talk will outline how Mylyn can double Java coding output by bringing the entire workday into the place where developers are most productive – the IDE. Demos will showcase how Mylyn’s task-focused interface integrates all leading task and Agile tools, SCM tools such as SVN and Git, and build/CI tools including Hudson. We will then review productivity best practices learned from deploying Mylyn at scale both in open source projects and large organizations. The talk will conclude with a vision of how realigning collaboration around a unified notion of tasks can yield a measurable productivity and knowledge capture benefit across the entire organization.
WHERE: JAX 2011 – The Conference for Java, Enterprise Architecture & SOA
Rheingold Halle Mainz
Rhein Strasse 66
55116 Mainz
Germany
CONTACT: For more information or to set up an interview with Mik Kersten please contact Christie Denniston at Catapult PR-IR 303-581-7760, ext. 13 or (cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com)
March 16, 2011
TASKTOP TECHNOLOGIES’ EXPERTS TO PRESENT LATEST MYLYN UPDATES AND BEST PRACTICES AT ECLIPSECON 2011
TASKTOP TECHNOLOGIES’ EXPERTS TO PRESENT LATEST MYLYN UPDATES AND BEST PRACTICES AT ECLIPSECON 2011
Six presentations look at the continued adoption of open source development tools in the enterprise and how Mylyn drives ALM productivity
WHO: Mik Kersten
CEO of Tasktop and creator of the open source Eclipse Mylyn project
Neelan Choksi
President and COO, Tasktop
Benjamin Muskalla – software developer, Tasktop
Steffen Pingel – software developer, Tasktop
Tasktop Technologies
(www.tasktop.com)
WHAT: With Mylyn now a top level project within Eclipse there is continued innovation and thought leadership around the Tasktop task-focus interface and ALM integrations that are available through the Eclipse IDE. At EclipseCon 2011 in Santa Clara, CA, March 21 – 24, the following six presentations will be conducted by both Tasktop team members and contributors to the Eclipse Mylyn project.
Monday, March 21 13:30 – 13:50
Tired of CVS? Pimp your productivity with Git, Gerrit, Hudson and Mylyn
by Tasktop’s Benjamin Muskalla and Tasktop’s Steffen Pingel
Tuesday, March 22 14:00 – 14:20
The Mylyn Reloaded
by Tasktop’s CEO Mik Kersten (and Chris Aniszczyk and Wayne Beaton)
Tuesday, March 22 14:30 – 15:10
The Business of Selling Free Software
by Tasktop’s Neelan Choksi
Tuesday, March 22 19:30 – 20:30
Mylyn – Application Lifecycle Tools BoF
with Tasktop’s Kersten, Pingel, Muskalla, and Choksi
Tuesday, March 22 10:40 – 11:00
Case Study: Shipping Mylyn Reviews for Software Development in Air Traffic Management
by Mylyn Review lead Mario Bernhart as well as Stefan Reiterer and Killian Matt
Tuesday, March 22 11:10 – 11:30
Mylyn meets Intent : Documentation made fun and useful
by Cedric Brun
WHERE: EclipseCon 2011
Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
Santa Clara, Calif.
CONTACT: For more information or to set up an interview with any of the speakers listed above, please contact Christie Denniston at Catapult PR-IR 303-581-7760, ext. 13 or (cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com).
March 11, 2011
Prediction #2: ALM tools become the gateway drug for hooking developers on cloud and PaaS
Prediction #2: ALM tools become the gateway drug for hooking developers on cloud and PaaS
by Mik Kersten, March 3rd, 2011
The productization of DOS by Microsoft in the 1980s kicked off the trend of platform vendors clamouring for developer mindshare. Apple’s App Store may only generate 1% of the company’s profit, but it drives the platform that sells Apple hardware. One of the best examples of the value of a developer platform is Microsoft’s Visual Basic (VB), which is yet to see a rival in terms of breadth and pace of adoption. In 2010, VB ranked as the 5th most popular programming language on the Tiobe index, still well ahead of iOS’s Objective-C. Microsoft’s investment in developers goes well beyond paying homage to the company’s roots, since Microsoft knows the sheer number of Windows license sales that can be attributed to each developer that they won over with VB.
Developers drive the success of platforms. Whenever a platform shift occurs, such as the shift from proprietary to open source or from desktop to mobile, interest in gaining developer mindshare is renewed. While we may all be overloaded with atmospheric-condition-related acronyms, we are in the middle of a fundamental shift in enterprise software platforms. The VMware hypervisor has replaced Dell blade server as the hot new technology. Application architectures are being transformed by REST-based services. Over the course of the year, support for multi-tenanting Java applications will result in more significant changes to the programming model that any of the incremental features coming in Java 7. The shift to cloud and Platform as a Service (PaaS) has ramifications beyond the change in the deployment model. One of the most important changes coming down the pipeline is the convergence of open source, PaaS and ALM. The continuous integration and delivery loop, becoming increasingly popular in Agile deployments, will put a new set of requirements on both ALM tools and the connection between the running application and the developer’s workbench.
All of this is good news for developers. There will be an increase in competition, choice, and budgets which are dedicated to bringing developers to new application hosting destinations and PaaS solutions. Over the course of the year, early adopters of PaaS will help to harden these new offerings in order to get them ready for the on-premise and private cloud primetime. If you are an early adopter and running a greenfield project, you’re bound to see some cool hosting and services thrown your way. But there are a few things you will need to watch out for when migrating to the bleeding edge. Beware the snake-oil pitch that moving your Java app into the cloud will be as easy as choosing a hosting provider. When migrating existing applications, you are likely to discover that achieving a scalable and cost effective architecture will involve significant efforts such as reconsidering your data storage, implementing multi-tenancy and porting the application to new ready-made services. This migration is similar to moving from a rural homestead to a downtown condo-it will take more than just a moving truck, your lifestyle will change, and you will spend less time worrying about your plumbing.
We have transitioned from thinking about applications as static entities that we build and deploy to living entities whose evolution is punctuated by releases and sprints. Given the turnkey automation promised by PaaS, developers will demand integration between the running application and the lifecycle tools used to manage it. This will drive one of the most important developer-centric trends in ALM, the convergence of application hosting and monitoring with ALM. The core ALM services of change management and continuous integration will become the hub between the developer’s desktop and the running application, with tasks as the unit of abstraction. An application failure or problem will automatically create a defect that includes the application state that is related to the problem encountered. The product owner will schedule that defect into the appropriate sprint, and when the developer picks it up, all of the code relevant to the defect will be instantly retrieved from the SCM system and brought into focus. The commit of the fix will automatically spin up a build in a staging environment, deploy it, and then pass it on to production or Ops when tests pass. This future needs a new level or coordination between the core services of the ALM stack and PaaS offerings.
Vendors that tie together the programming model, frameworks, virtualization, hosting and ALM will be the winners in the battle for developer mindshare. To capture a meaningful snapshot of a hosted application, the runtime must understand the programming model. To present this to the developer, the IDE tools must be capable of be effective in displaying that information alongside the code. And at each step of the way, it’s the ALM tools that will facilitate communication between the various stakeholders in the process: monitoring by Ops identifies a problem, that problem’s state is captured in the issue tracker, the issue pops up on the developer’s desktop, and then all subsequent changes are attached and captured on the corresponding task and reported in the build that was triggered. Workflows of this sort will require significant changes from ALM stacks, which have generally ignored the details of application build and deployment to date.
ALM services will also facilitate the migration of applications to the cloud. As we saw from the $212M acquisition of Heroku, supporting developer workflow provides a great on-ramp for application hosting. In the land of enterprise Java this is considerably more complex than a Git-based push and deploy of Ruby apps. But the need to bring this kind of simplicity to the Java application lifecycle is the same, and tasks provide the link necessary to scale continuous integration and delivery to large Java applications with a broader range of stakeholders ranging from dev, to Ops and QA.
Connecting the IDE to an ALM hub and using the hosted source and builds to drive deployment will provide a convenient on-ramp to application hosting offerings, and will significantly reduce the configuration and administrative burden currently placed on developers. While it can be fun to play around with configuring deployment environments and continuous integration servers, this level of busy work gets very tedious after a few months. A new level of automation is needed to help us focus on delivering application features and business value in the face of increasing platform complexity. Source, issue tracking and continuous integration will be a welcome gateway drug to cloud and PaaS application hosting. While having an app store claim 30% of all enterprise application revenues is not something we are likely to see this year, a Steve Jobs-like focus on turnkey simplicity of deployment and lifecycle management will help win the hearts and minds of developers making the move to the cloud.
To view more blog postings, please visit: (http://tasktop.com/blog/)
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