Long have the business analysts and project managers who create software requirements been marooned on an island, removed from the developers and testers tasked with ensuring that these requirements actually come to fruition. The reality for most organizations today is that requirements are still disseminated to developer teams in batches of spreadsheets, as are their updates, in a manner that is often lagging and removed from the tools that developers work with. Yet without the complete and up-to-date requirements, QA can't write valid tests, and Dev can't implement to spec.

Enter the new integrations in Tasktop Sync that now bi-directionally connect requirements to development and test artifacts. Through these Tasktop Sync integrations between IBM RRC, IBM ReqPro, CA Product Vision, and HP Quality Center, Tasktop now enables requirements information to flow in real time between the business analysts who create them, the developers who implement them and the QA professionals who test against them.

In this webinar, Robert Elves, co-founder of Tasktop Technologies, will describe how Business Analysts using Rational Requirements Composer can successfully create and revise Requirements while automatically keeping the Testing team up-to-date on the latest changes through the use of Tasktop Sync.
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* Featuring guest speaker from Forrester Research
** All webinar attendees will be automatically entered in a drawing for a new Apple iPad
For many organizations the ability to deliver software is fundamental to business success. New products, services, updates to channels, pricing or promotion require changes to applications and websites. Organizations are now looking to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to provide visibility into this increasingly core business process.

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 Research 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

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Join this session 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

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In this talk Dave West, Chief Product Officer at Tasktop, describes what Lean ALM looks like and introduces the 4 tenets of Autonomy, Transparency, Adaptability and Collaboration (ATAC) that unite to maximize flow. We are increasingly living in a software economy where business innovation and value are directly tied to software. Software supply chains are changing into ecosystems where control has to be replaced with transparency and collaboration. But has the management discipline of software delivery kept pace? Has ALM kept pace? The answer is NO. Traditional ALM approaches focused on tools and the SDLC rather than the collaboration and flow. In this talk Dave will cover:

• Why the time is right for Lean ALM
• What is Lean ALM
• Autonomy
• Transparency
• Adaptability
• Collaboration
• What it means to your tool and process strategy

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In this video recording of the recent EclipseCon 2012 Conference Keynote titled 'The future of ALM: Developing in the Social Code Graph', Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies and a creator of Mylyn, recounts the history of ALM and forecasts the near future of ALM. The keynote was met with great interest and enthusiasm...

FEEDBACK

Twitter:

@alexwilliams (Alex William, creator os): Awesome to see @mik_kersten in keynote really show why he is emerging as such an influencer in the open source world. #eclipsecon
@monkchips (James Governor): this keynote is TREMENDOUS.
@mik_kersten is kicking ass and naming names. i have to get him for the next Monkigras. #awesome #eclipsecon
@goetten (Vicente Goetten‏): Nice talk by @mik_kersten RT @IanSkerrett Social code graph = autonomy, transparency and collaboration #eclipsecon
@IanSkerrett (Ian Skerrett‏): some fascinating visualizations about how developers collaborate across organizations in open source from @mik_kersten#eclipsecon
@stefanlay (Stefan Lay): Amazing keynote by @tasktop @mik_kersten #eclipsecon #econ2012 : We will more push OS-like workflow inside the company with git & Gerrit

Conference evaluations:

"Great stuff! Definitely the best keynote in this conference and of the best ever."
"Great insight in what makes development/collaboration work well"
"Excellent talk with value for both developers and managers."
"Always a treat to listen to Mik's thoughts. Wonderful presenter of information and ideas.
"EXCELLENT TALK ! It was great see some science and development put to understand the challenges of the software ecosystem."

For video recordings of other keynotes given by Mik, please see: tasktop.com/resources/videos
For more information about Tasktop Technologies, please see: tasktop.com

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StarTeam 12 is here with full Tasktop Dev and Sync support. The new StarTeam release, together with Tasktop, includes a host of new features designed to benefit both developers and management. Now it is easier than ever to extend the interoperability and co-existence between ALM tools and asset types across software development teams, while management benefit from improved insight into delivery goals and their predictability. In this webinar you will discover the benefits of our new collaboration, and: * Discover how StarTeam customers benefit from Borland's strategic partnership with Tasktop * Learn how Tasktop Sync delivers visibility by integrating StarTeam with your other ALM tools * See how developers get the most modern and integrated experience for StarTeam with Tasktop Dev
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In this must-see webinar, Tasktop CEO Mik Kersten will provide the first in-depth view of Tasktop Sync 2.0. Tasktop Sync 2.0 provides a set of industry-first facilities for connecting your ALM stack. With the massive response to Tasktop Sync 1.0, we have focused this release on features for capturing your ALM architecture in the Sync tool in order to connect all stakeholders with real-time traceability and collaboration. Our goal is to help you transform your ALM stack by allowing you to tailor the best of open source, Agile, in-house, and enterprise ALM solutions. 
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For most medium and large organizations the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) stack has become so diverse and disconnected that the traceability and cross-stakeholder collaboration limitations have become a substantial bottleneck for software delivery. OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration – see http://open-services.net ) aims to alleviate this by providing open specifications for diverse systems to communicate and support integrated scenarios. While a growing number of systems implement the specification, it will take more time for OSLC to be widely supported by all leading ALM solution vendors. But there is no need to wait for increased OSLC adoption. Join this webinar to learn how Tasktop is harnessing the thriving open Eclipse Mylyn community of ALM integrations to realize the OSLC value proposition by providing broad multi-vendor OSLC support today.
Speaker Bio:
Robert Elves is co-founder of Tasktop Technologies where he is leading delivery of OSLC-enabled integration technologies. Robert has served on the OSLC specification committee since its inception and participates in the OSLC CM, Automation, and Core working groups. In the Eclipse community, Robert is a committer on the Mylyn ALM integration framework as well as the Lyo project, which is focused on providing an SDK to enable adoption of OSLC specifications. At Tasktop, Robert leverages OSLC to improve communication, traceability and reporting across heterogeneous software development solutions including IBM Rational Team Concert, IBM Rational ClearQuest, HP Quality Center, Microsoft TFS, and many others.
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Tasktop Technologies is offering a free Tasktop Sync webinar to explain all of the features and integrations of this new technology powered by Mylyn connectors. Tasktop Sync provides the only enterprise-scale ALM synchronization solution, built on the industry-standard Eclipse Mylyn ALM integration framework. Unlike previous approaches to ALM synchronization, Tasktop Sync provides real-time synchronization, automated conflict resolution, and support for over two dozen ALM systems. Building on Tasktop’s Task Federation™ technology, Tasktop Sync ensures that each stakeholder has access to the data that they need within their tool of choice. During the webinar, Mylyn creator and Tasktop CEO Mik Kersten will demonstrate Tasktop Sync and discuss the challenges that it solves. Kersten will show how Tasktop Sync connects development, QA, and agile project management together.
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With the release of Mylyn 3.5 and Tasktop 2.0 in March 2011, a critical problem we tried to address was helping companies and development teams deal with heterogeneity. Tasktop's cross-repository Agile planning tools are a perfect example of this. In this presentation, we will explain why it is so important to have Agile tools be able to reach across repositories to be truly usable by companies. We will then demonstrate how Tasktop's cross-repository Agile planning works highlighting how sub-tasks in a user story or on a Scrum board can have dependencies on issues from other systems. We will also highlight how all of this information can be available from within the Eclipse IDE as well as in an offline manner.
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