Tasktop enables you to connect the tools and practitioners in your software delivery process, providing traceability, enhancing communication and allowing greater visibility across your software development and delivery organization.

In spite of the complexity involved, our portfolio of products allow your tool administrators to create integrations across your tool landscape and work processes, by configuring, rather than coding these connections. Designed to scale, our enterprise-grade products provide high availability and reliability. The Tasktop portfolio contains several products that work together to create a lifecycle integration hub.

Increasingly, software delivery teams are trying to take the best practices of team-based Agile and apply them to the whole organization. Phrases like “scaled” or “enterprise,” are used to describe the desire to bring together disciplines such as planning, release and operations; and to increase the number of people involved in Agile practices. But both size and depth bring challenges to Agile, including integrating different practices, connecting distributed groups, and managing dependencies.

Scaling Agile requires integration

The more people that are involved in any endeavor, the more you have to rely on systems or tools, to enable those people to work together. But Agile has the additional impact of: reduced batch size; more frequent delivery: and an increased focus on team, rather than organizational, effectiveness. Unless everyone is working within the same system of record, and with the same process, automating the integration of the tools being used is crucial, for the following reasons:

Teams need information in near real time – Agile teams meet daily, changing priorities and adapting to improved knowledge. Getting information from other teams, and bringing that information back, must happen in the same cadence as the team works – with no delay. For example, if finding the status of a key dependency takes all week, it is very hard to manage it within a scrum. The team will just assume the work is not ready, and won’t integrate it into their work at the right time.

Reducing the cost of corporate reporting – Compliance, audit or even financial reporting does not disappear because development teams have gone Agile. Often, the larger organizational processes are more waterfall, and have legacy process models that include reporting requirements that are burdensome to an Agile team. Because Agile is an incremental or additive process, the overhead of frequently updating status, or reporting progress on timesheets, is problematic.

Support corporate planning – For many organizations, high-level business planning processes occur on an annual cycle. For these organizations, it is important that time and effort can be planned, and progress reported, in a traditional way. They are neither Agile or incremental. However, by integrating these planning lifecycles with Agile development, and by having consistent translation of the key artifacts, the overhead of managing two plans, is reduced.

Compliance and governance processes – For many, reporting is not just important for the purposes of delivering the project, but also to ensure that the project is conforming to corporate standards. Supporting compliance often requires cross tool traceability and reporting.