I’m very excited to share this video with Tasktop followers, partially because I’ve been promising it for upwards of 3 months (Tom, Sam, and Will: sorry for the delays), and partially because this has been an interesting integration case that customers are asking for more and more.
Conceptually, large companies are having to deal with heterogeneous tool stacks where developers are in one tool, testers are in a second tool, and the help desk is in a third tool. When the tools are a mixture of on-premise and cloud, the problems are exacerbated even if the tool is from a single vendor. In this example, we highlight an integration via Tasktop Sync among: – Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (being used for test management by the QA team), – Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online (being used for defect management by the development organization), and – ServiceNow (being used for IT Service Management by the Help Desk / Support Team)
Sync Studio Integration Visualizer showing integration between ServiceNow, and Microsoft TFS and VS
Of course, every customer’s stack is different, and Tasktop’s breadth of connectors allows each customer and even each line of business within a company (and frankly, even a couple of teams) to mix and match from all of the integrations we support to make sure the right information is flowing at the right time regardless of heterogeneity of the stack. And we are coming out with new integrations on a regular basis, so if we don’t support your particular tool today, come talk to us and let us know what you are looking for. The great thing about connecting development to test to service management and the help desk is that it really highlights a couple of the SLI/DevOps Integration Patterns we’ve been developing over the past decade.
The patterns that are most relevant in this case are Defect Unification and Help Desk Escalation and the benefits are: – making sure that when a problem is found in ServiceNow it gets to the developers who can fix it and testers who can ensure the fix is tested, – making sure test and dev are in sync and the right actions happen at the right time, and – closing the loop by ensuring that the help desk knows when a defect they’ve identified has been fixed, so they can let the customer (whether internal or external) know that it has been fixed.
Additional Screenshots
