Tasktop Technologies (www.tasktop.com), creators of Eclipse Mylyn and the leader in Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) developer tools and interoperability, today announced Tasktop Sync, a new product that allows IT organizations to synchronize existing ALM servers from multiple vendors and open source projects. For the first time, organizations with mixed and best-of-breed ALM stacks, including HP ALM and HP Quality Center, IBM Rational Team Concert, and two dozen other leading Agile and open source tools, are able to achieve traceability and reporting across the tools used for Agile planning, software development and quality management. Tasktop is demonstrating Tasktop Sync starting today at the Agile2011 conference in Salt Lake City.

„Large organizations adopting Agile are seeing major problems with communication and traceability across stakeholders,‰ said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies and creator of the open source Eclipse Mylyn project. „To scale to the needs of large organizations, it is vital that traditional requirements and quality management systems are connected to the new breed of Agile project management tools and existing ALM installations. Failure to automate connectivity and enable reporting between these disparate tools puts Agile deployments at risk. Tasktop Sync provides the only real-time and transparent connectivity between Agile planning and QA, while enabling developers to get the productivity and collaboration benefits provided by Agile methods and open-source tools.‰

To read more of Kersten‚s views and analysis of Tasktop Sync please visit his blog at http://tasktop.com/blog/eclipse/tasktop-sync-1-0-released.

The majority of large organizations adopting Agile have heterogeneous ALM environments that combine solutions from multiple vendors and open source projects. The mix of tools creates silos between development, quality assurance and management, leading to a critical lack of traceability across the software lifecycle.  This disconnect has been resulting in the failure of Agile deployments and other ALM modernization efforts.  To date, Tasktop‚s products have been providing developers with an integrated ALM experience within the IDE. With Tasktop Sync, the company fills this Agile tool disconnect with a powerful server-side solution to complement its suite of desktop tools and integrations (now called Tasktop Dev).  

Unlike previous approaches to ALM synchronization, Tasktop Sync is built on the industry-standard Eclipse Mylyn ALM interoperability framework to provide real-time synchronization, automatic and configuration conflict resolution, and support for more than two dozen ALM tools‚ tracking and reporting facilities. Building on the company‚s Task Federation˙ technology, Tasktop Sync ensures that each stakeholder has access to the data that they need within their tool of choice, even if the data resides between requirements management, Agile development and traditional quality management systems.

“ALM is currently hobbled by poor integration between tools at every layer – with every platform trying to be the single version of the truth, which makes life harder for managers and developers,” said James Governor, co-founder of industry research firm RedMonk. “Tasktop Sync takes the simple integration approach that makes its client-side technology effective into the server side, allowing for transparency across development projects, whether Agile or traditional.”

Unique features of Tasktop Sync include:
• Real-time synchronization (parallel execution and under one second time in queue per sync item with standard server specs).
• Automated and configurable conflict resolution.
• Visual administrator tools for synchronization mapping design and performance monitoring.
• Support for all artifact types, including tasks, work items, defects, requirements and tests.

Unique benefits of Tasktop Sync include:
• Most scalable: performance is based on number of concurrent changes, not number of artifacts.
• Most integrated: more than two dozen change management tools supported.
• Most reliable: thanks to its partner ecosystem, collaborations with ALM vendors and open source leadership, Tasktop is the most trusted vendor for ALM integration solutions.

Availability
Tasktop Sync is available on Aug. 9 and is offered through perpetual licenses with annual support and maintenance, or annual subscriptions. As an 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.