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DevOps Teams, Value Stream Management

Tasktop Integration Hub Launched, Value Stream Integration for Enterprise Agile & DevOps

Published By Mik Kersten

Agile has won, and DevOps is now standard at startups worldwide.  With all of the success stories we are hearing at nearly every conference we attend, why is it that the conversations within our conference rooms continue to bring up a lack of clear business results, or outright deployment and adoption failures?

The success of lean practices for software delivery is critical to digital transformation and innovation, and the failure to execute on them opens the door to disruption. Yet organizations rooted in “waterfall” practices are thinking about scaling Agile and DevOps the wrong way.  In prior decades, the way to succeed with new methodologies involved betting on the right platform.  But in the world of Agile and DevOps, there is no one platform.  Instead, we are witnessing a large-scale disaggregation of the tool chain towards the best-of-breed solutions.  For large-scale Agile and DevOps transformations to succeed, we must shift our thinking from end-to-end platform to tool chain modularity.

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Today I am thrilled to announce that after over three years of development, we are releasing a whole new approach to scaling Agile and DevOps.  The Tasktop Integration Hub completely re-imagines the integration layer of software delivery, and connects the end to end flow of value from business initiative to delighted customer and revenue results.  To do this we have created the new concept of Model-Based Integration, where we allow organizations to define their Value Stream Integration layer right within Tasktop, automating flow across people, processes and tools.  You can then map every best-of-breed tool into that value stream, easily scaling from a single Agile team to tens of thousands of happy and productive IT staff.  And you can continue connecting new tools as your tool chain evolves, giving you the power of modularity for the tool chain itself. Tasktop makes the tool chain Agile and adaptable to your business needs.

This release unifies our previous Tasktop Sync, Gateway and Data products into a single Value Stream Integration offering that easily scales to connect hundreds of projects, tens of thousands of users and millions of artifacts.  All with a beautiful and intuitive web UI that enables you to connect all of your tools without writing a single line of code thanks to Model-Based Integration.

Over the coming days we will be posting more detail about what we have done, how we have done it, and how it changes the landscape of enterprise Agile and DevOps.  For now, check out the following videos to get a quick overview of the product highlights and a whole new way to see the ROI of your transformation.

This release is the culmination of not only hundreds of people and years of development at Tasktop, but countless hours and effort from a dozen leading IT organizations who became a part of our Early Access program in April, and who have helped take the concepts from whiteboards and mock-ups to using them in production today. I encourage you watch some of their testimonials at our TasktopLIVE event and to join the conversation.

Product highlights include:

  • A world-first model-based paradigm for visually connecting dozens of tools across hundreds of projects without requiring any coding. For example, user stories, defects and support ticket models are defined in Tasktop, and then can be easily mapped across dozens of different projects and tools.
  • Support for applying different styles of integration across tools. For example, Agile and ITSM tools can be integrated for defect/ticket unification then easily connected to a database for instant Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) metrics.
  • Easy scaling across hundreds of projects. By defining models that span projects and tools, new projects can be on-boarded easily and connected to the value stream.
  • All integrations work all of the time thanks to Tasktop’s unique Integration Factory. Multiple versions of the same tool can be connected, along with old versions of legacy tools and the frequently updated APIs of SaaS tools, without breaking because Tasktop tests all version combinations. Currently, Tasktop supports 51 tools and 364 versions.

For more see the Product Overview or Request a Demo.

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Written by Mik Kersten

Dr. Mik Kersten started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he created the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development tools with Agile and DevOps as part of his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open source code that are still in use today, and he has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market. Mik’s experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical disconnect between business leaders and technologists. Since then, Mik has been working on creating new tools and a new framework - the Flow Framework™ - for connecting software value stream networks and enabling the shift from project to product. Mik lives with his family in Vancouver, Canada, and travels globally, sharing his vision for transforming how software is built, and is the author of Project To Product, a book that helps IT organizations survive and thrive in the Age of Software.