Your path to business agility
Browse curated reading for engineering professionals.
At Tasktop, our engineering teams have been using an Agile Scrum process for years, with great results for our software delivery. This process has helped us to reduce waste and provide predictability and visibility in our integration factory, which delivers 4 on-time releases every year. However, my own team, which had only recently been formed,...
I recently published a post about why I love working with open source software. At Tasktop, we have a strong open source history. Because of their participation in open source communities, many people already knew each other long before joining Tasktop. Last Thursday, one of my team members reached out and asked for advice with...
These past eight months I’’ve spent working at Tasktop, I’’ve picked up some truly interesting and marketable skills. Among the expected skills for a Quality Assurance Engineer (attention to detail, ability to assess large swaths of code for functionality, critical thinking for creating tests, communication skills) one of the skills my colleagues point out is the fine...
It’s been a while since Java 8 was released. It brought us great additions like lambdas, streams, optionals, and many more. Here at Tasktop we do mostly Java programming and are focused on increasing our productivity every day. Since we are working with Java 8, a bunch of Eclipse templates were created that make developing...
Developing and testing changes in an environment that is the same as the deployment environment is one of the magic ingredients of the DevOps way. For engineers at Tasktop working on the Integration Factory, provisioning a new VM can occur multiple times in a day, so any inefficiencies in the process are painful. I recently...
We are just back from the Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps Transformation Summit and, from what we can tell it more than lived up to its promotion. For three days, software development and delivery professionals availed themselves of talks, educational sessions, vendor information and networking in the beautiful Bay Area. It’s our understanding that this...
On September 4, 2014 WhiteHat and Tasktop announced their partnership, while simultaneously introducing the WhiteHat Integration Server. The WhiteHat Integration Server is an OEM of Tasktop Sync technology, which includes a connector to WhiteHat Sentinel, and a selection of connectors. The addition of security to the Tasktop ecosystem is important for so many reasons. Security...
Most organizations will experience failed software projects. They won’t necessarily crash and burn, but they will fail to deliver the value the customer wants. In other words, the software projects will not deliver an appropriate level of quality for the time and resources invested. The extent of failed software projects is calculated every year in...
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...
Bad requirements are often cited as the biggest reason why software projects fail. Badly understood or missed requirements drive business executives to despair. The business and development all blame each other for why things went wrong, and ultimately the end users don’t get the system they want. Over the last 20 years, the industry has...
