As organizations move agile into the enterprise and transform their businesses, their tools need to have the ability to work at scale. Tasktop wants to help with Tasktop Integration Hub, which features a new approach to integrating and connecting best-of-breed tools.
“It used to be enough to get away with throwing an agile tool or Scrum process at a bunch of teams and be successful, but as companies go from hundreds of developers doing agile to now thousands, that way has become much more difficult,” said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop.
According to him, the problem today is there is no longer a single vendor to help businesses move toward Continuous Delivery and faster iterations. The best-of-breed tools that have proven successful to startups and small teams do not work well together at scale. As a result, teams experience duplicate entry, lack of visibility, cost overruns and compliance exposure.
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“These fragmented tool chains create a fragmented value stream that can actually put you in a worse place than you were before you started your transformation,” said Kersten.
The Tasktop Integration Hub is a new model-based approach to integration that allows teams to visually connect dozens of tools across hundreds of projects without requiring any coding.
“We realized in order to make things flow end-to-end, you have to define your actually value stream,” said Kersten. “That is exactly what this new Tasktop Integration Hub lets you do. It raises the level of abstraction in your tool chain and has you define models right in Tasktop of how a defect, release or requirement flows through your tool chain. From that you actually get this real-time, uninterrupted flow of information.”
The new approach builds on the company’s existing solution Tasktop Sync. According to Kersten, the company realized that even Sync was coming to a dead end and could not easily support hundreds of different projects. Tasktop will still continue to offer and support Sync, but believes its new integration tool is a much easier way to doing things at scale.
“Tasktop allows enterprises to define value stream artifacts and flows in a unified Integration Hub, ensuring that teams get the productivity benefits of each tool while the business realizes immediate ROI from eliminating the waste of manual entry, automating end-to-end traceability and easily achieving end-to-end visibility,” said Kersten.
In addition, the integration hub offers support for different styles of integration, the ability to define models that span projects and tools, and an integration factory feature that allows users to connect multiple versions of the same tool.
“We have implemented Tasktop [Integration Hub] in our environment as a means to keep information across software development applications updated at all times,” said Doran Snider, software test manager for Jeppesen, a Boeing company. “Jeppesen has benefited from this product as it allows us to keep using a heterogeneous tool set, as well as provide our disciplines with the same information across applications.”