Tasktop Technologies New Sync 2.0 Provides ALM Architecture Mapping and Application Lifecycle Linking Via OSLC

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Nov. 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Tasktop Technologies (www.tasktop.com), creators of Eclipse Mylyn and a global leader in ALM integration and developer tools, today announced Tasktop Sync 2.0, the latest version of its Task Federation™ platform  that allows IT organizations to synchronize existing ALM servers from multiple vendors and open source projects. Tasktop Sync 2.0 makes it even easier for administrators to manage their ALM synchronizations through powerful visual tools and extends integration support via change management artifact linking via the Open Services for Lifecycle Management (OSLC) interoperability protocols.

"Complex sourcing has become the norm for most companies – including off-shoring and open source – and deployment across a multitude of platforms, such as mobile, embedded, cloud and on-premise, drives software development challenges," said Melinda Ballou, program director for IDC's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) service. "In this context, lack of coordination across lifecycle management phases and automation undermines business innovation and agility. Companies urgently need ways to effectively connect a broad range of lifecycle tools to enable visibility, metrics and control."

Tasktop Sync is built on the industry-standard Eclipse Mylyn ALM interoperability framework to provide real-time synchronization, automatic and configurable conflict resolution, and support for more than two dozen ALM tools. It unifies heterogeneous ALM stacks by allowing developers, testers, business analysts and managers to work within their best-of-breed tools of choice, while automatically maintaining traceability across ALM artifacts. Built on the company's Task Federation™ technology, Tasktop Sync brings task federation to ALM servers, by providing the only real-time, bi-directional and fully automated synchronization between ALM servers. The company's Tasktop Dev product line supports Tasktop Sync by federating tasks and other ALM artifacts on the developer's Eclipse and Visual Studio desktops.

"Medium and large organizations' ALM stacks have become so diverse and disconnected that the lack of traceability and cross-stakeholder collaboration has become the bottleneck of large-scale software delivery," said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop and creator of the open source Eclipse Mylyn project. "Tasktop has spearheaded a new approach to connecting stakeholders in the application lifecycle, making it possible to capture an organization's ALM architecture in a single tool and deliver real-time connectivity and traceability across a wide variety of open source, commercial and legacy ALM systems." (To read Mik Kersten's blog post on this announcement please visit: (http://tasktop.com/blog/news/tasktop-sync-2-0-released)

Tasktop Sync 2.0 includes several innovations for connecting ALM stacks and stakeholders. It provides new visual tools that allow ALM architects and administrators to connect to ALM repositories, conduct introspective analysis of repository schemas and intelligently connect previously disconnected tools via ALM artifact mappings. In addition to artifact synchronization, Tasktop Sync 2.0 provides a new software lifecycle artifact linking facility built on the OSLC ALM interoperability protocols to serve as a broker for linking ALM artifacts.

Based on Tasktop's continued collaboration with IBM to define the OSLC protocols, Tasktop Sync 2.0 provides OSLC-based REST API access to more than 20 Tasktop Certified™ Mylyn connectors as well as dozens of other community-driven or in-house Mylyn connectors.  For example, organization using IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) tools in the ALM stack, such as Rational Team Concert and Rational Requirements Composer, can now link with artifacts from a broad range of third-party and open-source ALM tools, such as HP ALM and Quality Center, Atlassian JIRA and Mozilla Bugzilla. OSLC linking extends Tasktop Sync's synchronization facilities to support live connectivity and embedding of ALM artifacts in a similar way that social networking tools can embed each other's feeds (e.g., Twitter within Facebook). 

New Features in Tasktop Sync 2.0 include:

• Sync Quick start wizard to dramatically reduce the time to set up the first synchronization.
• Visual editor for configuring synchronization mappings.
• Fine-grained and automated conflict resolution and handling.
• Full support for custom fields, rich text and wiki transformations, attachments and user mappings.
• Synchronization support for all common ALM artifacts, including defects, tasks, work items, test summaries and requirements.
• Unlimited mappings and repositories to connect large-scale ALM stacks with numerous servers and tools.
• Bi-directional synchronization of task associations, ALM artifact hierarchies, and complex fields.
• Groovy-based scripting support for complex field transformations.
• For IBM CLM users, full support for IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) synchronization rules and mappings, allowing administrators to update mappings within RTC.

In addition, Tasktop announced the availability of Tasktop Dev 2.2 that brings new connectivity for developers using HP ALM and Quality Center. Tasktop Dev 2.2 builds on HP's Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI) feature to provide instant workspace provisioning for developers using Eclipse. Now, developers can simply connect to a release in HP ALM, and Tasktop's Task Federation facilities load into the workspace the SCM and Continuous Integration (CI) artifacts needed to work on the release, for example, source code from Subversion or builds from Hudson/Jenkins. Tasktop Dev 2.2 also extends HP ALI traceability automation to ClearCase.

Availability

Tasktop Sync 2.0 and Tasktop Dev 2.2 are both available for download tomorrow. Tasktop Sync is offered through perpetual licenses with annual support and maintenance, or annual subscriptions. As a limited-time introductory offer, Tasktop Sync is available as a bundle with Tasktop Dev (Enterprise Edition) for $199 per user, per year. More information is available at (http://tasktop.com/sync).

About Tasktop Technologies

Tasktop Technologies aims to transform the productivity of software delivery by unifying Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and empowering developers with task-focused tools. Tasktop invented the task-focused interface and created the popular Eclipse Mylyn project, which transformed the developer's IDE experience to center around ALM tool-based collaboration. Building on top of Mylyn, Tasktop has been unifying the ALM landscape with its broad ecosystem of ALM partnerships that connect disparate tools from leading Agile, enterprise ALM and open source offerings. Tasktop's Task Federation™ technology builds on this ecosystem to unify heterogeneous ALM stacks by allowing developers, testers and managers to work within their best-of-breed tools of choice, while automatically maintaining traceability and visibility across ALM artifacts. The company's Tasktop Sync provides the only real-time bidirectional and fully automated synchronization between ALM servers. Tasktop Dev is the developer-centric ALM interface for the Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs, making it dramatically easier for developers to work and collaborate, while keeping ALM tools up-to-date with development activity. For more information visit http://tasktop.com

Media Contact:
Christie Denniston
Catapult PR-IR
[email protected]
O: 303-581-7760, ext. 13
M: 303-827-5164

SOURCE Tasktop Technologies