Software Change Management: Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration

http://www.ibm.com/software/rational/innovate/

Mik Kersten of Tasktop Technologies speaks about the Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration initiative. The initiative provides open source and enables integration between different applications, offering tools for seamless change management.

[Mik Kersten, Tasktop Technologies]
My name is Mik Kersten; Im the CEO of Tasktop Technologies, the company behind the Eclipse Mylyn project.

Last year at the Rational Software Development Conference we learned about the Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration initiative. And at the same time, at Tasktop we were struggling in a way to create the connector for IBM ClearQuest.

So we realized that in order to do this, we wanted to leverage open APIs and we wanted to build our commercial integrations on top of both the open source Eclipse and Mylyn APIs, but also specifications that we could count on and that could work for other kinds of ALM ALM integrations. And thats exactly what OSLC is. It enables us to do that and to both provide an open source implementation and our commercial extensions to have a seamless integration between ClearQuest and the Eclipse IDE.

So we've got—an interesting thing thats happening with change management in that theres been such a broad range of tools, of issue trackers, or bug trackers, of defect tracking tools and [...?...] tools. And none of these tools have had standard APIs to this point.
So what OSLC does is provides this common layer, this common rest [?] space, web service APIs, that we can all build our tools on top off, whether they're reporting tools or planning tools, or these kinds of IDE integrations, and better clients like were building in Tasktop.

So what did is we learned about the OSLC initiative, and weve been building both the open source extensions to OSLC in Eclipse, and the commercial integration with ClearQuest, on top of the OSLC specification, this open specification that allows us to both build our commercial products and our open source frameworks on top of it. And really, its going to bring about the next level of ALM integrations with change management tools.

So there's a big business benefit to both the producers and the consumers of the OSLC APIs. The producers get to create a standard API that a variety of tools can build on and can create high—very high quality integrations for, whether its integrations of the IDE or integrations with mobiles devices for non-programmers to access. And then you can see the benefit that results for the consumers of the APIs. They get a consistent user experience across all of their ALM technologies, and they get state of the art tool support, even for legacy systems they can't yet migrate from.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• OSLC
• Eclipse Mylyn
• IBM
• Rational
• ClearQuest
• open source
• Tasktop Technologies
• Mik Kersten