Some of the most interesting problems in technology only surface at scale. For the past few years, the majority of Tasktop’s customers have been using Sync to achieve scaled Agile. Without tool chain integration, it is impossible to get hundreds or thousands of IT staff adopting enterprise Agile methodologies such as SAFe, DAD, Scrum.org’s Nexus or other hybrids of Scrum. The largest scaled Agile deployments on the planet rely on Tasktop Sync as an integration hub connecting the various layers of Agile delivery.
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However, those very same organizations have realized that deploying Agile alone is insufficient, as having faster delivery is meaningless if deploying the software to production is a bottleneck. This is why the DevOps movement is so critical to achieving efficiency at scale. However, the question then becomes, how do we achieve scaled DevOps?
I am thrilled to announce that Tasktop is releasing an entirely new technology layer that provides organizations with the world’s first “DevOps Integration Hub”. This is not a new product, rather a whole new capability that has been added to our existing Tasktop Sync and Tasktop Data products. We have created something called the Tasktop Gateway, which exposes the Tasktop integration platform with a modern webhook, REST and JSON based integration layer that will allow any DevOps tool to be connected to the software lifecycle.
Since the first technology preview in the summer, our customers have been creating key integrations such as connecting Selenium-based test execution to Agile planning tools. We call these integrations DevOps Recipes, as they tend to integrate multiple tools involved in a continuous delivery flow that needs to be connected to the rest of the Agile/ALM/SDLC tool chain. Additional DevOps Recipes our customers are deploying today include Jenkins integration for flowing build information to user stories or requirements, as well as GitHub and Gerrit integration for automating change set traceability. We are thrilled that whatever the tool chain, DevOps automation engineers will now be able to leverage the full power of Tasktop rather than needing to code brittle point-to-point API integrations that break constantly and provide no central management or administration.
Tasktop Gateway works by providing the DevOps engineer with a way to model the artifacts and flow that’s needed for automation. Tasktop then exposes these models over inbound webhooks that any tool can connect to. So rather than being limited to synchronizing artifacts across tool, Tasktop can now take inbound artifact creation and update requests and map them into any of the 40 Agile/DevOps tools and 296 versions that we support and test today. The great news is that with the release of Gateway, it is now possible to deploy DevOps at scale.
The possibilities here are endless, especially since these integrations get to leverage the full power of Tasktop Sync, which gives you the ability to federate your entire tool chain, and Tasktop Data, which now provides end-to-end visiblity for the DevOps lifecycle. I recently blogged on how DevOps principles were applicable broadly enough to be key to delivering artifacts as complex as cars. At last week’s IBM InterConnect conference we got to learn just how profound this shift is, from Bosch, who explained how they deliver the software powering electric cars. Jörg Spranger and Amin Jbabli summarized how the 1000 person strong team delivering inverters for electric and hybrid cars is doing so with a connected lifecycle.
The change requests for the team from Bosch’s OEM customers flow in real-time into Bosch’s stack using Tasktop Sync. Over 2400 such requests and all related updates are being synchronized by Tasktop each month for just a single customer, indicating the scope and rate of work and innovation being driven through Bosch’s software lifecycle. What happens after is even more fascinating as Bosch described how they are leveraging Jenkins to drive it’s build and capabilities, which end in automating the burning Flash ECUs for the inverters. This level of automation is exactly what every software delivery organization should be striving for, be it for delivering IT or IoT. And with the launch of Tasktop Gateway, it is now possible to connect every step of continuous delivery process to your existing lifecycle tools.
If you’re interested in learning more about deploying the Tasktop DevOps Integration Hub, please register for our What’s New in Tasktop Sync 4.5 & Data 1.4 Webinar on March 16, read Betty Zakheim’s blog “Scaled Agile, Lean, and the Journey to Scaled DevOps”, view our press release, and do not hesitiate to contact us directly.
