We have a great webinar coming up, titled: Transforming development visibility and productivity with Borland StarTeam 12.0 and Tasktop. In this webinar, Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, and Stuart McGill, Borland General Manager, will show you how StarTeam customers benefit from Borland’s strategic partnership with Tasktop, and the increased visibility that Tasktop Sync delivers by integrating StarTeam with your other ALM tools.

The new StarTeam 12 is comes with full Tasktop Dev and Sync support. Together with Tasktop, it 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

When: Tues, Feb 7th, 2012: 8 am PST, 11am EST Presented by: Mik Kersten, Tastkop CEO Stuart McGill, Borland General Manager Register now: Webinar – Borland & Tasktop

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I’ve long been an admirer of Tasktop, for a number of reasons: First, as Eclipse users already know, Tasktop has built some really cool Eclipse technology, including the Mylyn task-focused interface. But many companies have built cool open source tools. It’s much harder to take those tools and build a growing, dynamic company around them. But plenty of companies have also done that, usually by following the standard open source business model: package services and a bit of value-add around a captive open-source offering, and wait for customers. Tasktop takes a far more challenging and rewarding approach: It nurtures a healthy open source eco-system around core technologies, but then re-imagines and re-purposes them, leveraging unique products that address real customer pain. That takes real vision, and to me it’s a clear signal that the Tasktop leadership is able to imagine and execute at an entirely different energy level.

So rather than admire Tasktop from a distance, I joined it! I first worked with Tasktop last year as a consultant developing the initial implementation of what has become the Mylyn Model Focusing Tools project. That was a great opportunity to get to know some of the team and the Tasktop way. Everything I saw then fit nicely with what I’d already intuited. We have a really great combination of engineering excellence, creativity and lightweight organization.

It’s nice to say “we” again — I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed having colleagues to work together with on challenging problems. The morning I joined Tasktop, I saw a stream of emails from everyone welcoming me to the team. I must admit to some cynicism about the whole “team” thing — like so much else, it can be an empty word that doesn’t match up to reality — but in this case it feels very genuine. So heartfelt thanks to everyone.

It’s an exciting time to be building software tools. It might sound funny, but I like to think of software development as a helping profession. That’s because I think that software products really can help people live more fulfilling, interesting and even happy lives. When I tell my family and non-techie friends that I’m working on Automated Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools I get a blank look. So instead I remind them that almost everything we do relies on software and that software programs are by far the the most complex artifact that humans have ever created. And I tell them that software development communities are growing ever more diverse, distributed, interwoven and complex. So what do we do at Tasktop? We build software that embraces those complexities.

Tasktop Dev tackles the issue of software complexity. It handles a lot of the repetitive and boring stuff, simplifies and clarifies everything else, and is deeply and imaginatively integrated with other development tools. Tasktop Sync and Code2Cloud — along with other exciting tools that we’re working on — tackle the even more challenging issue of community complexity. Even a relatively small software product might involve code developed by a rich community spanning companies, technologies, continents, and even (think about the Open-Source movement) different economic models and incentive systems. And in larger projects thousands of developers might be collaborating across all of these dimensions. Software development efforts are intimately connected with customers, management, marketing, support, regulators and every other imaginable kind of stakeholder. All of these people need to talk to one another, and it seems that everyone uses different tools to manage the unique aspects of their tasks or work environments. Tasktop builds software that helps those tools to work together so that everyone can focus together on the stuff that matters. In short, we break down boundaries and help people communicate. That’s worth doing.

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Five years ago, on Friday January 15th, I defended my PhD thesis on Focusing Knowledge Work with Task Context. The following Monday, January 17th, we incorporated Tasktop Technologies. Driven by the years of research that it took to prove that tasks are more important than files, integration is more important than features, and that focus begets flow, we embarked on a journey to bring to market a transformation in how we work and collaborate around software.

Our journey and passion have been fueled by our customers and our open source community, as to date we have not taken any external funding, and instead embarked on what’s more recently been defined as the Lean Startup approach to building a company in an Agile and customer-centric fashion. Bootstrapping, we have doubled in revenue and nearly doubled in head count each year since our inception, and now support over a thousand customers and over a million open source users. Working closely with our ISV partners, the Eclipse community and open source ALM projects, we are proud to be one of the key contributors defining the future of ALM.

In addition to the opportunity to be a part of a transformative endeavor, what’s guided our vision is a manic focus on the needs of individual software workers. Mylyn and its commercial counterpart, Tasktop Dev, materialized because the growth in complexity of software and the fragmentation of ALM tools were bringing our and our fellow developers’ productivity to a halt. Tasktop Sync was born out of the same need to give other stakeholders such as testers, project managers and business analysts, a connected and collaborative view on the software delivery process. With our focus on integration, our goal is to empower developers and other stakeholders in order to advance ALM to support the rise of the software-powered economy.

We want to take this birthday moment to thank all of the customers and partners who have made it possible for us to do what we love, which is to invent the future of ALM and to strive for our goal of doubling the productivity of software developers and managers. We hope you like the next round of innovations that we are hard at work for launching in 2012, which will be a definitive year for software, for ALM and for Tasktop Technologies.

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We recently put out a year in review press release. I thought it would be fun to put together a top 10 list of my favorite accomplishments from this year.

1. People love working for Tasktop as evidenced by us being named the 2011 Best Employer in BC and named BC Business Magazine’s #4th best company to work for in BC in the Digital Tech & Services Category 2011
2. The introduction of Tasktop Sync extending Tasktop’s integration capabilities beyond the developer to other constituents in the software development process including testers, managers, and business analysts
3. Open source leadership with active participation in the Eclipse Foundation including: continued leadership of Mylyn and the promotion of Mylyn to a top-level Eclipse project, mentor of Hudson and Lyo (OSLC SDK project) in Eclipse, participation in various Eclipse DemoCamps, Eclipse Island in CeBIT, Eclipsecon, etc., active contributor to nearly two dozen open source projects
4. Four Tasktop Dev product releases
5. Expansion of the Tasktop partner ecosystem with new connectors for Accept360, Polarion, Borland StarTeam, and SmartBear CodeCollaborator
6. Task Focused Continuous Integration via a new connector for Hudson and Jenkins
7. Cross-repository Agile Planning with Eclipse IDE integration and offline support
8. Tasktop Dev for Visual Studio extends the capabilities historically available to Eclipse users to .NET users as well
9. Mik Kersten’s 2011 Top 10 Prediction Series was incredibly popular, and we also discovered that Mik considers writing a guilty pleasure. Mik also introduced ALM Automation during his keynote at JAX
10. Recognition for our efforts as we were awarded the 2011 AllianceONE Partner of the Year Award from HP – Innovative Partner and were named a finalist as the Most Innovative Java Company at the JAX Innovation Awards 2011

We want to thank you for supporting Tasktop in 2011, and look forward to an even more active 2012.

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Tasktop is #4 on the list of 2011 Best Companies to work for in British Columbia in the Digital Tech & Tech Services category.

This is in addition to Tasktop being named Best Employer 2011, by Small Business BC earlier this year.

We are always looking for individuals with exceptional talent to join our team. If you’d like to join Tasktop, see our careers page.

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This year’s Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit was held in Vegas. What better place to learn both blackjack and IT strategy especially when two of the Tasktopians were on the MIT Blackjack team. We had a cool handout highlighting the pain points that Tasktop Dev and Tasktop Sync help solve, as well as a basic strategy table for Blackjack. Tasktop was a silver sponsor of the event and we had a blast networking and strategizing with fellow innovators and industry leaders.

We had a lot of fun hanging out with our new partners from Borland who attended the show as well. We’re proud to announce that customers of Borland StarTeam can now gain interoperability and integration via Tasktop Dev and Tasktop Sync. The desserts at Serendipity were bigger than Borland product manager Nicole’s head.

Congrats to Naji from California who won a new iPad2 in the Tasktop giveaway draw.

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