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

Published By Mik Kersten
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 tools implementing them vary greatly, the principles are consistent.  Short iterations, automation, real-time collaboration and end-to-end traceability are critical to an effective software lifecycle.  These principles are relatively easy for individual teams and startups to adopt.  The massive challenge that mid-size and large organizations are faced with is how to reap the benefits of Agile at scale.

While December’s Tasktop Sync 3.0 release extended our support to DevOps, the 3.5 release is all about supporting Agile at scale. Sync is now the lifecycle integration infrastructure for 5 of the top 25 world banks and powers many of the world’s largest Agile deployments.  The larger the scale of the deployment, the more problematic the disconnects between tools and processes become.  With Sync 3.5, we are introducing a new capability to our software lifecycle bus called Artifact Relationship Management.  This provides the last mile of integration needed for large scale Agile.  In addition to synchronizing the artifacts that make up your lifecycle, we now synchronize the relationships between those artifacts.  The result is end-to-end traceability and for best-of-breed and heterogeneous Agile deployments.  Which is pretty much every sizeable Agile deployment.

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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.