Tasktop announced the Tasktop Agile Planner at Agile 2010 with immediate availability to the beta via an early access program and general release in mid-September. The Planner is intended to enhance current ALM offerings by connecting planning activities (teams, team leads, coaches) to task management activities (developers) in a common environment (Eclipse / Mylyn).
Tasktop's Planner can provide access to project management tools, including Thoughtworks Studios' Mingle, IBM Rational Team Concert, Rally, CollabNet's ScrumWorks, Atlassians's JIRA, and Version One. It also can link user stories with defects stored in external systems like HP's Quality Center and Bugzilla.
Mik Kersten notes:
The problem of plans becoming disconnected from development activity is rampant in enterprise adoptions of Agile. The Tasktop Agile Planner addresses this by ensuring that all ALM systems involved with planning are linked and accessible directly from the Eclipse IDE, where developers and team leads spand the majority of their workday."
Mik Kersten is the originator of the open source Eclipse Mylyn project and sees ALM and the new Planner as tools for developers and team leads. "These tools are intended to support a teams effort to manage themselves, self-organize, and increase communication among themselves - not to allow micro-management from above or to impose undue procedures that would violate Agile principles."
In addition to Planner, Tasktop also announced a change in their management team - the addtion of Neelan Choksi as President and COO. Mik Kersten retains his role as CEO and lead visonary for the company he founded. Choksi, a long time Tasktop board member, previously played leadership roles at SolarMetric, SpringSource, and LexCycle, where he served as CEO.
"Providing a seamless integration between day-to-day development activity and product portfolio and innovation management," is the goal of a joint venture between Tasktop and Accept Corporation according to Mik Kersten. This third announcement at the Agile 2010 conference involves integrating the Accept360 tool to the Eclipse IDE via MyLyn. The tool will provide developers working on a task, access to "the 'context' of source code, documents, and Web pages that are most relevant to the task." The goal is to better align customers, business strategy, products, and development efforts.