Mik Kersten
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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.

Tasktop 3.6 released: IBM DOORS, Jama, integrating things

Nothing catches the technologist’s eye like an elegantly designed gadget, with software and hardware flowing together in design harmony. The trouble is that traditionally, the way we build software and the way we build physical things have had very separate lifecycles. The V-Model of systems engineering provides the predictability needed to assemble little things into...

Tasktop Sync 3.5 released: VersionOne, Zendesk, links get sync

We’re at the ALM Forum this week, where the hot topic is how to scale Agile and DevOps deployments.  What Scott Ambler made clear in his opening keynote is that there isn’t a single Agile best practice that spans the various sizes, domains, business processes that we find across organizations. While the practices and vendor...

Tasktop Sync 3.0 released, service desks get support

Open source projects have it good. Their issue tracker serves as the single system of record for all development, support, quality management and planning activity. The result is a theoretical ideal in terms of a connected software lifecycle. For example, every vote that a user makes for a particular bug is immediately visible to developers....

Tasktop Sync 3.0 released, service desks get support

Open source projects have it good. Their issue tracker serves as the single system of record for all development, support, quality management and planning activity. The result is a theoretical ideal in terms of a connected software lifecycle. For example, every vote that a user makes for a particular bug is immediately visible to developers....

Tasktop Sync 3.0 released, service desks get support

Open source projects have it good. Their issue tracker serves as the single system of record for all development, support, quality management and planning activity. The result is a theoretical ideal in terms of a connected software lifecycle. For example, every vote that a user makes for a particular bug is immediately visible to developers....

Tasktop 2.8 released, Serena partnership announced, death to timesheets

Filling out time sheets is about as fulfilling as doing taxes. This mind-numbing activity is an interesting symptom of what’s broken with the way we deliver software today. What’s worse than the time wasted filling them out is the fact that the numbers we fill out are largely fictitious, as we have no hope of...

Tasktop Sync OEM’d by IBM, RTC users get connected

Today the IBM Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters Tasktop Edition appeared on the IBM price list. This OEM version of Tasktop Sync makes the technology broadly available to IBM clients using Rational Team Concert (RTC), who can now get all of the benefits of Tasktop Sync’s real-time and collaboration-centric ALM integration infrastructure. This helps IBM clients...

Submission deadline for Agile ALM Connect at EclipseCon 2012

This Friday is the submission deadline for the Agile ALM Connect sub-conference of EclipseCon. This new conference fills a gap that many of us have noticed in the conversation around Agile, ALM and developers. The “developers” part of the equation is often either missing or an afterthought. Even though developers were the root cause of...

Eclipse Mylyn 3.6 lights up Indigo, puts an end to faceless builds

Yesterday’s Eclipse Indigo release delivered a year’s worth of improvements on what has become the de facto IDE platform for Java and beyond. The Java package has seen major additions, including the WindowBuilder tool that originated from Instantiations and the m2e plug-in that eases Maven-based builds. EGit 1.0 is an essential tool for the growing...

Proposal to move Hudson to Eclipse

Some of the most successful open source projects have histories that transcend organizational boundaries. My first experience with this was AspectJ, which we launched as an independent open source portal out of Xerox PARC in 2000. In 2003 our DARPA funding dried up, but the user community was still growing. We moved the project to...