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. As soon as a new feature is added, users watching the corresponding task are automatically prompted to try the latest build and report back. This kind of real-time connectivity between users, developers and project leaders makes for an incredibly efficient build-measure-learn loop, which explains why so many open source project are able to deliver so much value so quickly.

Having lived it day-to-day, it continues to inspire me in wanting to bring these benefits to software delivery in the large, where these benefits can make a tremendous difference.

The problem is that this open source project management approach doesn’t scale to the enterprise. It’s fine when you’ve got one stakeholder playing multiple roles. For example, on Mylyn I played the role of developer, product manager, tester, and support desk. I spent so much of my time triaging and commenting on bug reports that, in order to help me get through the tickets fast enough to have enough time for coding, I ended up adding features to Mylyn to make it work as a developer’s inbox for triaging tickets. The experience of other open source projects leads that I know is very similar, in that a tremendous portion of their time is spent triaging and responding to users.

This direct touch with end users enables open source developers leverage the collective wisdom of their community so quickly. However, the developer’s issue tracker does not scale to meet the demands of commercial software support, such the need for SLAs and ITIL processes. So a separate help desk tool is required, once that separation is made, real-time collaboration between the developer and support team stops, and reverts to inefficient channels such as email and meetings. The result is a chasm between the people who are user facing and those who are developing the application. The knowledge of the customer’s experience gets siloed into the help desk and voice of the customer gets diffused by the time that the next sprint planning session comes around. Given the increasingly primary role that the service desk plays in the software lifecycle, as evidenced by the amazing growth of ServiceNow, we need to fix this.

Our goal with Software Lifecycle Integration is to unify the ALM stack while allowing software stakeholders to use the systems that make them most productive. With today’s Tasktop Sync 3.0 announcement, we are very happy to reveal that the Sync bus now supports ITSM artifacts such as tickets and problems, and can connect service desk tools to the large and growing number of Agile and ALM tools that we support.

Tasktop Sync makes it possible to extend the popular Defect Unification SLI pattern to the service desk, meaning that tickets matching specific criteria, such as those marked as problems, are automatically created as issues in the issue tracker or defects in the quality management system, and synchronized bidirectionally from that point on. For example, if the defect is Synced to IBM’s RTC, developers can schedule them onto a sprint, and the support team will instantly know that it has been assigned. And as soon as it’s completed, the workflow transition will happen on the service desk indicating that the fix is ready to review or deploy to the customer. Comments and activity streams are federated in real-time. And then it’s smiles all around.

We are launching two service desk integrations with Sync 3.0. Our integration for ServiceNow integration is fully certified by ServiceNow, and will support the many uses of the ServiceNow platform ranging across its ITSM and lifecycle capabilities. We are also launching support for Atlassian’s recently announced JIRA Service Desk, which builds on our comprehensive support of JIRA versions including the latest JIRA 6.1. And as usual, there will be more to come so please let us know what other support desks you would like to see integrated.

Connecting the help desk and bridging the task management gap between Dev and Ops is the most exciting Sync 3.0 news in terms of our mission to scale the efficiency of open source development to the enterprise software lifecycle. In other news, we’re releasing new template support for inheriting and extending mappings, making it dramatically easier to manage large numbers of of projects with different schemas. For those customers using Rally and Serena Business Manager, we’re very happy to announce the GA of those Sync connectors along with the Tasktop Dev connector for developers accessing Serena from Eclipse and Visual Studio. We’ve also extended the Sync bus to support time tracking federation between Agile and PPM, enabling time on task to flow between your Agile system and CA Clarity.

Finally, the big news for both ALM vendors and customers is a beta program of the new Tasktop Connector SDK. You may think that SDKs should be old news given that Tasktop created and maintained the Mylyn SDK, which became one of the most extended SDKs on Eclipse. But it turns out that in order to support the real-time lifecycle bus architecture of Sync, an entirely new integration extensibility layer had to be created in order to support robust and easy-to-implement 3rd party extensibility. Along with it we created a bridge to support Mylyn connectors, so if you created one of those you’ll have a head start. If you’re interested in being an early adopter partner of the SDK, please get in touch. 

We’re thrilled that the tremendous customer demand that we saw for connecting the service desk ships today, and look forward to bringing the voice of the customer into the enterprise software lifecycle. Want to learn more about Tasktop Sync 3.0? Register for an upcoming webinar: