Betty Zakheim, VP of Industry Strategy
Table of Contents Introduction 1 Vendor Criteria 2 Product Capabilities 3 Professional Services and Support 7 Total Cost of Solution 8
Introduction As the leading experts in Software Lifecycle Integration, Tasktop has created this to help organizations understand the options they have for integrating their software development and delivery lifecycle tools. We ve compiled these criteria from our experiences supporting the world s largest Agile/SDLC/DevOps transformations, including 27 of the Fortune 100. Our neutral role among ALM tool vendors has given us a perspective that spans tools and methodologies. In this document we have summarized the key integration requirements for ensuring that your transformation is a success. Organizations that understand the transformative effect that integrating their software development and delivery lifecycle can have on their business are faced with a daunting set of decisions: 1. Should we continue to use ad hoc, or manual methods of connecting the various disciplines within the lifecycle? 2. If we decide to automate the flow of artifacts between lifecycle tools, should we develop the integrations ourselves, or should we find a vendor that has products and experience in integrating our tools? 3. If we find a vendor with this kind of domain expertise, what should our selection criteria be they can sound so similar, which one is right for us? This document is focused on the third question: given that you ve decided to find a vendor with domain expertise in integrating software lifecycle tools, how can you discriminate among them to find the solution that s right for your organization? Selection criteria usually fall into the following major categories: Vendor Criteria Product Capabilities Professional Services and Support Total Cost of Solution 1
Vendor Criteria Product selection criteria should include not only include the features and capability of the product, but also an understanding of the company that develops and supports it. Criteria Tasktop Alternative Broadly deployed integration technology Ability to invest in R&D, testing and post- sale support Experienced management team Tasktop s integration technology was originally brought to market through Mylyn, the widely- used Eclipse plug- in and had been used by millions of users even before Tasktop Sync was brought to market. Tasktop s products are trusted by some of the largest, most demanding IT organizations in the world. Tasktop has forged alliances with the top ALM tool vendors. Tasktop not only invests in a world- class development and post- sale support team, we also have an extensive test infrastructure running hundreds of versions of endpoint products and hundreds of thousands of API tests each day. Our testing dashboard provides an endpoint version compatibility matrix with evidence of passing API test criteria. Tasktop s leadership has vast experience in integration, development methodologies and tools. This experience forms the basis for our product innovations and customer success. Most other vendors have less experience with systemized integration technology and have limited strategic relationships with tool vendors. Many other vendors do not invest in this type of infrastructure, resulting in less reliable products. 2
Product Capabilities There are many different approaches that a vendor can take when architecting their solution. They can take the approach of assuming that integration is so complicated that it can only be achieved by a combination of a software toolkit and customization/professional services. Or, they can take the approach that although it s a difficult job, it is the job of the software to handle this complexity. The first approach may seem reasonable, but the customizations not only add to the cost of the initial deployment, but they also make the integrations brittle. When the endpoint tool vendors update their products, the customizations to the integration solution often break. Not only does an approach that minimizes the need for customization have greater reliability, but they generally also have a lower total cost of ownership. In order to properly assess your choices of integration products, you must gain an understanding of how the integration products deal with the complexity inherent in integrating multiple tools. These tools: support disparate software development and delivery disciplines (and their artifacts), manage artifacts that appear similar in the various tools, yet have nuanced differences, have been customized to support an organization s unique workflows, including custom attributes, custom attribute types, and a complex fabric of relationships among artifacts, are installed in an environment where you may have several versions of each product in use, are regularly updated by their vendors, sometimes changing how the tool works and especially how that functionality is reflected in its API. After all, an integration product that can only handle simple and straightforward integration scenarios may suffice for the short term, but it will become a disappointment over time, as its brittle nature surfaces. Product Design Criteria Some criteria regarding how the integration product is designed include: Criteria Tasktop Alternative Method of integration Some integration products use data integration (extracting and loading data directly into the tool s database) rather than APIs. Data integration is brittle; when a tool vendor changes their database schema, the integrations break. Tasktop uses API integration and has a robust test lab that runs tests against these APIs every night. Some vendors use a mix of API and data level integration. This causes integrity issues, since operating at the database level circumvents and violates the business logic of the application. 3
How connectors are built and tested An integration tool should be architected using a bus model where a canonical representation of artifacts is created and a rigorous connector specification describes the interface to integrated products. This specification allows rigorous testing. Support of multiple versions of endpoint products Customers are often faced with running multiple versions, sometimes very old versions and sometimes the very newest. The integration tool must support the versions of the endpoint products that the customer is using, or will soon use. Data update architecture The technique used for detecting data changes and updating each endpoint system must be designed to minimize the transaction burden on the endpoint systems. Tasktop has this kind of canonical representation and connector specification. We use this specification not only to build our connections to vendor products, but also to test that these connections are flawless. Our test lab runs a full gamut of API tests every night. When a vendor changes their API, we detect it, work with the vendor to fix their defects, while simultaneously developing workarounds to keep our customers running until the fix is available from the endpoint tool s vendor. Tasktop can provide a fully documented version compatibility matrix with full evidence of all API test criteria and support, as well as limitations for each tool version. Tasktop works closely with the vendors in the Tasktop Integration Network to quickly support new versions of their products. As important, Tasktop supports old versions for as long as their vendor supports them. Tasktop uses a technique that performs incremental synchronization, and only synchronizes changes. Similar to the design of incremental compilers, this is done to enable operation at scale. If integrations are created point- to- point, and customized when installed, the result is brittle and prone to failure. This failure can manifest either in the integration not completing, or in data integrity issues. The integration vendor may not support the versions of the endpoint products that your organization uses and may not have strategic relationships with their vendors. Vendors that do not have this scheme make excessive API calls to the endpoints, creating a performance burden that slowing down the endpoint systems for their users. 4
Ability to handle your organization s Use Cases It is very important to be sure that your integration product will be able to model and support the complexity of your processes and tools. Sometimes, this complexity isn t apparent until you investigate how you ve deployed each endpoint, how they may have been customized, and how each tool differs from the tools you plan to integrate with it. Criteria Tasktop Alternative Ability to handle disparate artifact attribute types (without customization) For example, comments may be in plain text, rich text or wiki markup. Statuses may have 5 levels in one system and 3 in another. Your solution must be able to perform these transformations without customization. Tasktop has a rich library of type transformations. Some alternatives only handle simple type transformations. Ability to handle custom attributes and custom data types Endpoint systems are generally customized by their users, your integration tool must be able to automatically identify these customizations and must be able to handle them without the integration itself requiring customization. Ability to manage complex transformations Ability to handle complex relationships among artifacts Mirroring one artifact from one system to another, with high data integrity, is the low water bar for integration. Your integration solution must also be able to mirror the complex relationships among Tasktop automatically interrogates the endpoint s data schema and handles these custom types the same way it handles the standard, out of the box data types. Tasktop also has the extensibility to accommodate an organization s unique data types. Tasktop s experience allows us to handle some very complicated scenarios. For example, time tracking in PPM tools and in Agile planning tools is vastly different, it s not simply a matter of copying values from one tool to the other. Tasktop s Artifact Relationship Management features are designed to automatically handle the myriad of relationships types that the endpoint vendors have built into their tools and can mirror those relationships across tools. Tasktop can even Some other integration tools require manual intervention to handle custom attributes in the endpoint systems. Most other tools have not been built to handle enterprise- class complexity. Most systems can only handle synchronization of basic relationships. This limits the integration s ability to support the organization s business practices and prevents critical information, such 5
artifacts in one system to the other systems. These relationships provide the context that the practitioners using these systems need when performing their work. Ability to handle the above without custom coding The more custom coding an integration tool requires, the more brittle and expensive its deployment will be. Ability to handle large deployments, with many projects An integration tool that does not provide features for scaling deployments is not enterprise grade and will become costly as your use of the tool expands. Robust error handling and conflict resolution Inherent in integration is that the synchronized artifacts are in use by multiple systems and users. Conflicts regularly occur. The integration tool must handle these conflicts, including being able to manage when an endpoint is off- line or down. Robust data integrity An integration system that does not view data integrity with paramount importance will become problematic very quickly. accommodate synchronizations where the target system does not support the same types of artifacts as the first. While Tasktop Sync provides extensibility features, the majority of customers do not require them. Deployments are configured using our GUI, not coded. Tasktop includes many features to enable the configuration and administration of large deployments. This reduces administration overhead and cost. Tasktop Sync has a robust conflict resolution sub- system with configurable error handling and notification. Tasktop continues to operate, with no loss of data integrity even when the endpoint tools are off- line. Data integrity is a top priority. We have a provisional patent for some of our work in this area. as traceability to be surfaced. Many alternatives will claim support for certain use cases, but they only do so through custom coding. Alternatives may handle small deployments readily, but scaling these deployments to other teams and projects incurs the same administrative investment, with limited reuse of previous work. Conflict resolution is often manual, or semi- automatic. Vendors will rarely admit issues with their data integrity. Reference checks with your vendor s customers is essential. 6
Professional Services and Support Criteria Tasktop Alternative Support staff must be expert in the product and located in geographies close to the customers The Tasktop support organization is headquartered in North America, with satellite offices in Europe. Some vendors have limited geographic coverage. The professional services team must be experts in ALM tool use as well as integration Much of the work involved in tool integration should revolve around being able to support your development and delivery workflows and how to best leverage your tools, not just about how to connect two systems using the integration vendor s tool. Vendor has a support portal and knowledgeable support engineers Because of the nature of our products, Tasktop professional services teams concentrate on helping our customers get the best use of their ALM tools, not simply installing and deploying our products. Tasktop has an on- line knowledge base and trouble- ticketing system. Naturally, our support engineers are also available via telephone and email. They often get fan mail from our customers. Vendor teams are often are experts at their product and coding the required customizations, but have little experience with the endpoint tools. Many have limited post- sale support. 7
Total Cost of Solution It s easy to mistake the cost of software licenses as the total cost of an integration solution. However, if the integration solution requires extensive professional services, the total cost of ownership of that solution can easily eclipse the initial license costs. What are these professional services? They typically include: custom development for the initial deployment; installation and deployment support; administrator training; custom development when changes occur (usually when endpoint tools are upgraded or when additional artifact attributes are desired) It s not unusual for the vendor to provide a quote for the initial software licenses and ongoing support contract for those licenses, however the total cost of an integration solution must be assessed before understanding the relative cost of the alternatives. The alternative that appears to be the low- cost option may in fact be more expensive in the long run. Custom development for the initial deployment and ongoing maintenance Assessing the integration tool s ability to support the use cases in your environment is key to understanding the actual cost of the initial deployment (see the Ability to handle your organization s Use Cases section in this document). If the tool requires extensions or customizations to support how your organization is using your SDLC tools, these customizations will have to be developed either by your staff, the integration vendor s professional services team, or a third- party vendor. But these costs don t end once the initial deployment is completed. The nature of customizations is such that once something changes in the environment (such as an endpoint tool vendor releasing a new version of their product), these customizations often fail and must be either fixed or re- implemented. Similarly, once you achieve success in your initial deployment, you will want to scale to other projects, or integrate more tools. If the integration tool requires customizations, new customizations will have to be developed when you scale. Administrative cost It is also important to assess not only the cost (and usefulness) of administrator training, but how much administration effort is needed to keep the system running effectively. 8
Tasktop Tasktop products are designed and tested to be enterprise- grade. To deploy the system, it is configured, not customized. It s designed to handle complex SDLC tools and complex workflows right out of the box. It s rigorously tested to make certain that it operates flawlessly. We provide our customers a learning curriculum for administrators that can be completed in one day and with each release of Tasktop Sync, we add features that make administration more and more straightforward. Our initial license costs may seem more expensive than alternative solutions, but in all but the most simplistic integration scenarios, our total cost of ownership is either competitive, or actually lower. To learn more about how Tasktop Sync and Tasktop Data fulfills these selection criteria, please contact us as info@tasktop.com. 2015 Tasktop Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Tasktop and the Less is More logo (<=>) are registered trademarks of Tasktop Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. TTSTBG1511c 9