For many people reading this blog, crisis may seem too strong a word – After all the oil crisis in 1973 left Americans waiting in line for gas, and as a child I remember the coal miners’ strike in the UK in the 70’s that let me spend Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at home.  They were real crisis’s – crisis that everyone is talking about. The situation with software surely is not of that magnitude! Well tell that to an employee of Blockbuster, Borders or Tower Records. The inability of those companies to exploit software fundamentally destroyed their business.  And increasingly it is affecting companies in other sectors ranging from manufacturing, to retail. Software is eating your lunch, and you don’t know it!

As software development pro’s we are perhaps the best placed to see the change. A change in our economy that has our friends, parents and even our dentist talking about their latest app, or how Groupon saved them money on a fantastic dinner. But unfortunately, though we see the change we seem unable to accept that this means our lives will have to change. We accept that we will have to use different technologies and programming models, but our jobs, the process that we follow, and how we collaborate with other practitioners will also have to change. For many Agile defines that change – describing a set of practices that will fundamentally improve our lives, allowing us to adapt to the unknown in a much more effective manner.  Agile does provide a great set of practices that help teams build software just a little bit better, but does not provide guidance for radical change of the complete value chain for software.  It does not equip our management with the tools necessary to manage the software assets inside and outside of their organization. Application Lifecycle Management does. It provides a management discipline to the practice of software delivery. But ALM needs to change in response to the crisis.

Perhaps the only other industry that has gone through such a transformation is the automobile. In the 70’s a fundamental change happened to the discipline of manufacturing. In response to changes in the market, the practices of Toyota made their business much more effective than those of their rivals. This led to Toyota becoming the poster child of the automotive industry, and Detroit having some rocky times that it has only just started to emerge from. The practices that allowed Toyota to succeed have been described as ‘Lean’.  The focus on reducing waste, whilst increasing value with empowered workers supported by information and techniques drove a different manufacturing process, but also sparked a revolution in many industries. It is time that ALM adopted those same principles. It is time for Lean ALM.

Still interested in the whole idea of Lean ALM? Come to the webinar on May 31 and hear a more detailed description of what it means.

Lets get the dialogue going…

Was this at Tasktop? No… it was when I was a product manager for an Agile/ALM Vendor. And, as a product manager, these conversations were always the most depressing. Why? Because – we needed to be delivering features that would improve developers lives, not backend plumbing. Our customers wanted things like improved backlog management, better reporting on defect rates and cycle time, more automated testing capabilities. But there were always other tools in place that our product needed to interface with, and so for us to improve our bit of the software value stream, we had to integrate with all these other tools. This meant significant effort was dedicated to integrations which took up too much of our time and, frankly, from an Agile/ALM vendor’s point of view, is a lot more boring than delivering the next cool Scrum team board features!

Now… here is what is interesting and, in the ultimate irony, proves why Tasktop’s participation in the software delivery value stream is so critical…

As a product manager at Tasktop, I now have the same conversations about integrations. But they are not depressing – they are invigorating because it is the heartbeat of how we can help our customers and partners. What is the irony? What we need at Tasktop to efficiently deliver integrations – great backlog management, automated testing, and visibility into our processes — are precisely the features that Tasktop’s various partners, the Agile/ALM vendors, can provide us – if they only have the time to focus on their feature set rather than integrations!

My new perspective, as part of the Tasktop team, is to free our vendor partners from worrying about integrations between tools so that they can concentrate on delivering great new features around Agile and ALM – and what once depressed me, now invigorates me each day!

Read more in Dave’s post, Mik’s post and my post on the topic.

We have another great webinar coming up. Join Daniel Morris (Polarion) and Benjamin Muskalla (Tasktop) for a live demo of a day in the life of a developer and project manager using state of the art development and ALM tools from Tasktop and Polarion.

Learn how to:

	Improve project visibility for all team members
	Drive productivity by connecting the IDE with requirements management, development planning and reporting
	Foster innovation, communication and knowledge transfer by bringing virtual teams together in one integrated platform
	Get the most modern and integrated developer experience for Polarion

Agenda:

1. Project Planning with Polarion
   

   	Design of Requirements, Test Cases and Defects guided by workflows
   	Create your own requirement specification using Polarion´s document like editor
   	Collaborate with external stakeholder via Polarion Round-Trip for MS Word

2. Development Integration with Tasktop Dev
   

   	Show task integration
   	Personal planning
   	Task context
   	Collaboration
   	SCM Integration
   	Build integration

3. Integration of information back to Polarion
   

   	Full Traceability from Requirement downkn to test to source code
   	How Polarion supports agile processes

During the webinar our experts and technical consultants are also available to answer your questions.

The very rapid growth that our products have seen lately is indicative of the need to look beyond any single tool in the evolving ALM stack, and consider the flow of information between the people that define the disciplines of the software lifecycle. Tasktop got to where we are today by placing a manic focus on the needs of the individual software developer, who was getting completely overloaded with the disconnected morass of ALM tools that failed to connect to the source code that defines delivery. That forced us to create a new model of social tasks that emphasized autonomy, transparency and integration across the increasingly diverse tool chain. With Tasktop Sync, our Task Federation has migrated from supporting Agile delivery on the developer’s desktop to connecting the rest of the software lifecycle in order to bring about a “Lean ALM”.

Driving a change in the way that software is built takes like-minded people filled with passion and purpose. Dave’s mission is to help people build software just a little bit better, and with our shared values, we expect that goal to materialize very quickly. In his role as an analyst, Dave has heard the software delivery needs and gaps of countless software organizations that build the products and services that we all rely on day-to-day. In his role as Chief Product Officer, responsible for transforming that need into our product vision and roadmap, you can expect Dave to accelerate our pace of customer-centric innovation even further as we work with our partners and open source community to connect the software lifecycle.

Read more in Dave’s post and Neelan’s post.

• Autonomy – Empowered individuals and teams to solve problems and get things done.
• Transparency – Success is enabled by clear understanding of status and progress.
• Collaboration – Software delivery is a team sport requiring flow between managers and fans.
• Adaptability – Flexible, Agile processes enable teams to succeed.

By focusing on these four areas software delivery professionals can not only create a much more efficient delivery value stream, but also more importantly deliver increased business value. However these concepts are not easy and some of the challenges include:

Autonomy

After years of corporate control and traditional manufacturing approaches being applied to knowledge workers organizations have a really hard time allowing individuals to take control of their actions. Accountable yes, but able to make choices about how they do their work, or the tools and techniques they use, no way ! But increasingly we see developers taking control of their destiny. In part this is because the rate of innovation has outstripped the speed of corporate control groups, and developers are pivotal to business value and innovation.

Transparency

Separate tools, different processes, disconnected departments, and outsourced vendors all add to the complexity of trying to build a complete picture. Many organizations look to the PMO to solve this problem, spending lots of time, and money trying to compile a view of the truth. But the PMO approach is less and less likely to work with the increased cadence of software delivery where status changes frequently.

Collaboration

Many companies talk a good talk about teams, but the reality is that software delivery pro’s are measured as individuals, in multiple teams and have contradicting priorities. That makes collaboration difficult for teams, and even harder for external stakeholders who find interfacing with these ever changing entities complex and frustrating.Complex value streams just add to the mess.

Adaptability

The only time you know how to do something is when you have done it before. But most software development processes focus on sequential flow, assuming that if you spend enough time up front and apply the right techniques you can solve any problem. Agile has proven that this is not the case and has become the defacto standard for development. But the reality of is water-scrum-fall with development teams using Agile, but management and release requiring teams to still deliver in a sequential manner.

So, i hear you ask, what does this all do with my move to Tasktop.. In a word Tasktop provides the glue that enables organizations to realize these four tenets :-

• Autonomy – Allowing individuals to use the best tools to do their job whilst ensuring those tools work together.
• Transparency – Connecting repositories to enable one view of the truth.
• Collaboration – Tasks enable structure, conversation and context.
• Adaptability – Support customization of tools and flexible processes.

Modern web architectures, restful interfaces and open source development tools have created the perfect storm for building a stateless integration hub that integrates the value stream of software delivery.

My job at Tasktop is to drive the product vision in support of the four tenets. But i can not do this alone and will be working with you all, the tool vendors and the broader community to ‘help people deliver software just a little bit better’

Read more in Mik’s post and Neelan’s post.

Dave

@davidjwest and dave.west@tasktop.com

Ever since Tasktop started in 2007, we knew we were onto something that would transform application development and delivery. Mylyn, Tasktop Dev and Tasktop Sync have been delivering on that promise and we are very proud that our customers are seeing significant ROI with the use of our products. The webinar series has been a great channel for gathering external feedback that the benefit of the products that we are delivering for customers is very real. In last week’s webinar, we got further confirmation that the ALM integration problem we are solving for our customers is increasingly being acknowledged as a major pain point for the entire industry. In this screen capture from the webinar, Dave West highlighted that Forrester has uncovered integration as the largest roadblock for deploying ALM solutions. Features like the latest Agile planner are what gets talked about most, but integration is what’s needed to get the benefits of Agile deployments and the ROI of ALM modernization efforts.

There were numerous other insights that we gained through this webinar. I summarize a few of those insights below but encourage you to watch the webinar recording itself.

The modern software development world is marked by a desperate need to deliver software faster. There has been a fundamental shift in the cadence of software delivery driven by the proliferation of platforms, faster iterations and Agile development methodologies. In this new world order, innovation and speed has overtaken cost as the core measuring stick for software development organizations.

As Marc Andreessen wrote, “software is eating the world“. It is ubiquitous and growing ever more complex. The latest Mercedes Benz car comes with 20 million lines of code included. But if software is truly the differentiator, why is it always late, frequently unreliable, and usually of poor quality? Why do 30-70% of software projects fail?

The core premise is that many organizations haven’t kept up with the changing times. Software now comes from a variety of sources which creates dependencies to the broadening ecosystem. In the past, software managers ruled with an iron fist, controlling everything. In today’s world, control is a fallacy, and the best way to manage the ecosystem is with acceptance and visibility. However, today’s dev organizations don’t always have the discipline to be successful but instead go through the motions with what Dave refers to as “process pantomime”. The handoffs aren’t well defined, and developer chaos rules. In an interesting twist of fate, Agile is actually providing some of the discipline that has been so sorely lacking.

Dave further highlights that Agile has been the catalyst for a lot of the changes we’ve seen. Traditional ALM focused on traceability, workflow and reporting. All that made sense when you were only talking about 1-2 handoffs every 6-12 months, as outlined in the waterfall and other legacy methodologies. Today, ALM is characterized by lots of handoffs in the same time period and hence modern ALM is about augmenting the traditional view of ALM with automation, work planning and collaboration. Another issue that Dave raises is one that is near and dear to our hearts at Tasktop: he highlights the holistic view of a task that provides the context for effective collaboration linked to the work that needs to get done and linked to the steps in the software development and delivery process. Dave adds that seamless integration and ALM automation is critical for success in this Lean, Agile, fast iteration world which is exacerbated by disciplines that use completely different tools. This aligns perfectly with our mission at Tasktop as we spend a lot of our days striving to help companies through ALM Automation™ and Task Federation in order to practically ensure that the information from any one tool doesn’t stay stovepiped but rather is accessible by all constituents via the tools they already know and love.

Increasingly, getting all disciplines to work together by integrating the value stream is the key challenge. This is Tasktop’s primary focus, as we’ve learned that part of the battle is building tools to facilitate this challenge. We’ve also learned that in building these tools we’ve exposed the mess that arises during the collaboration between the siloed departments involved in software development and delivery. This has been exacerbated by the fact that the stacks of tools in each silo have been changing rapidly. In many organizations, ALM architecture is lacking and no one is responsible for the holistic process and cross-departmental workflows. At Tasktop, we’ve augmented the Tasktop Sync solution with Sync Studio to provide visual and monitoring tools to address the mess that we saw.

The entire process of developing and delivering software is disconnected and lacks visibility and traceability. The historical attempts at integration are manual or broken, and things are getting worse as the lifecycle is getting more complex. Despite all of the challenges, we are starting to see some best practices such as having an ALM Architect on staff who is responsible for the entire software value chain (this sounds like a topic for a future blog). We are also seeing some patterns emerge on how to deal with the chaos more effectively:

• Pattern 1: Defect Unification
• Pattern 2: Planning Visibility
• Pattern 3: Requirements Traceability

In conclusion, I really want to encourage you to watch this webinar recording. In addition to the details of the patterns, there’s a ton more fodder in the webinar that I don’t even mention in this already too long summary blog, including interesting stats on usage of ALM components, introduction to flow-based ALM, a discussion on batches and reducing batch sizes, and devOps place.

Finally, congrats to Don B of NC for attending the recent Tasktop webinar “Getting ALM2.0+ to work: Breaking down the silos to provide an integrated value chain for software delivery and beyond” and winning the iPad. Don’s name was randomly selected from the list of attendees of the webinar.

If you want to learn more about Tasktop Sync, the Ovum Technology Audit for Tasktop Sync provides another independent view point. You can also visit the Tasktop Sync page for more info or to request a demo.

Some have objected to my statement that Linus Torvalds’ bigger contribution to our planet is going to be Git, not Linux. Yes, Linux is everywhere. But Linux was a creative imitation, whereas I was focusing on the true innovations that are moving us towards the social code graph, and that’s precisely where Git fits in. Also, early in the talk I mention that Eclipse has gone from 1.5M to 2.5M downloads between January 2011 and January 2012. That’s monthly downloads, and with Vietnam surpassing Germany, a clear sign of the times.

Watch the keynote here, and I look forward to hearing your feedback and ideas.

ALM promises the benefits of business management to the practice of software delivery. ALM2.0+ describes the next generation of practices that broaden the lifecycle to include operations and the business and add functionality for planning and collaboration.

But introducing ALM is difficult, with developers, business analysts, operations, project managers and QA professionals all having their own tools and working practices. Bringing order to this chaos requires a different way of thinking about ALM – one based on stakeholder inclusion and cross-vendor integration.

In this talk, featured speaker Dave West, Vice President, Research Director at Forrester will describe the reality of ALM adoption. West and Mik Kersten, Founder and CEO of Tasktop Technologies will present patterns for successful ALM adoption for mid and large-scale organization, and highlight how organizations can incrementally obtain the benefits of ALM by connecting siloes, one stakeholder at a time.

This talk will:

	Introduce ALM2.0+, its promise and its challenges
	Define a series of ALM integration patterns
	Describe how successful organizations are delivering software more efficiently with ALM2.0+ today

All webinar attendees will be automatically entered in a drawing for a new Apple iPad 3.