In this episode of The Crossroads, Patrick Egan chats with Lothar Schubert, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing for CollabNet about their latest release. CollabNet®, the leader in Agile development in the Cloud, announced the availability of CollabNet TeamForge(tm) 6.1, the latest version of the company's award-winning Agile software development platform. TeamForge 6.1 enables the adoption of Agile methods across large-scale enterprises by dramatically speeding Subversion file and code sharing across globally distributed teams, automating governance for large-scale communities, providing resources that enable social coding, and offering enterprise-grade tools. This set of breakthrough platform configuration capabilities delivers up to 70% faster time-to-market by codifying the Agile software development and organizational management practices that CollabNet's customers have implemented over the past decade.
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Video Transcript
From CMC media this The Crossroads. I'm Patrick Eagan, publisher of the Agile Journal and CM Crossroads. Today we're talking with Lothar Schubert, Senior Director of Solutions marketing for CollabNet, so welcome to the show Lothar.
Thanks for inviting me.
Well, we're talking about what's going on in TeamForge today, and really I'm kind of curious about what trends, challenges and opportunities for enterprise development organizations today.
Sure. Well, Agile has obviously has been a huge success. It's now the tenth anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. Recently a survey that we conducted about twenty-six percent of all participants had fully adapted Agile and over 50% were in various stages: piloting, implementing, or partial implementations of Agile.
Now companies often want to go to next step and really scale vertically in terms of number of applications, number of applications, number of locations, and horizontal it means not just code but really firm requirements over code to build and test.
And they discovered scaling Agile is actually not that easy, especially where there is highly distributed organizations is in multiple levels of maturity within the organization itself if there are multiple maturities and modern methodologies deployed and different technologies. They discovered they needed governance, a central governance across the organization, visibility across the organization, however, without impeding flexibility and autonomy.
And they do discover scaling Agile requires tools and infrastructure.
Gotcha. So, what do you think can you tell me what's unique about Team Forge and how it compares to other tools out there?
Yeah, sure. Especially when it comes to scalability enterprise scalability in reality which is very unique. By providing both enterprise, scalability and utmost, flexibility.
Mm-hm.
Scalability in terms of, well, number of developers that it can effectively work against a single platform. You talk about hundreds, thousands, ten thousand, fifty thousand users potentially. One million artifacts, multiple locations, pure scalability and really completeness which causes scalability across software delivery, across document management, collaboration and social infrastructure and have it very manageable.
So that is the scalability and togeCollabNetther with this comes the flexibility. Any methodology. Sure Agile, but any Agile. Also hybrid Also whatever methodologies. Any technology. Be it Java, be it Ruby, be it any other technology such as .Net For example in deployment, in the cloud, or on premises. And if you pair this with leadership, in subversion, B at the Apache subversion founder and the key corporate sponsor, and the leadership in Agile transformation with coaching and training service, over ten thousand Scrum trainers, or actually Scrum masters are being trained by CollabNet, so that's what companies go for, for team.
Okay. So, I know that 6.1 is out or maybe just coming out in beta. What can you tell me about what's new in the latest release.
TeamForge 6.1 just came out in java availability, so it's available fully to customers. It actually has been a major release for CollabNet, and more importantly for our customers. It specifically, in particular, addresses the notion of scaling Agile, by having codified the 25 best practices that we had collected over time from Fortune 500 companies he observed.
He worked with companies that had implemented Agile and other methodologies, and we took those best practices and codified them into the platform and really delivered iteration on multiple fronts. One size is in terms of really managing volume. For example, subversion replication to really overcome any bandwidths limitations for geographically distributed coding and software delivery.
Second, also the manageability of security, for example, is very effective role in management for subversion but also in general for software release cycles. Strong workforce enforcement and then the whole notion of social coding or actually social development has been built into the architecture, which what we say is a social really architecture by having project micro sized, brought in from open source world abroad also into the private enterprise the ability to map essentially product and business lines to micro size, which drive communities where you need a project.
It's very powerful. We also brought completely new reporting elements, reporting and dashboard elements into the platform to really provide governance and visibility.
Okay. Well, I heard you talk about subversion replication. Can you expand on that a little bit to tell me what that's all about?
Sure. I mean, in a nutshell, it provides for subversion, lightning fast performance, and also high visibility, no matter where you are as a developer or as a project manager, for example. Doesn't matter in which location of the world. I mean, subversion in general scales very well. No surprise there are like 5 million developers now already on subversion.
But there are area networks, welled air networks, inefficiencies, right, if you are a highly distributed organizations. Assume for example, development just got on board with a new project and wants to dump it down with the entire code library. This developer might be sitting there for For hours, sometimes even for days, just getting this board off, it is very frustrating and not very inefficient.
Now what Team Forge 6.1 provides now they leverage the opened and published the APIs for subversion for replication and brought them into the product. And it also provides the entire time management framework to very rapidly provision use of subversion repositories. This way you have very fast access, doesn't matter from where in the world.
All right. You talked about an expansion of continuous integration into operations. And it sounds a little bit like DevOps, so is that just analysts talking or what's that all about?
Right. No, it's not like analysts talk. I mean, if you look at the manifesto really early and continuous delivery of the variable software is one of the key elements of the manifesto, so no wonder that continuous integration and tester development and that's what is really happening, and we actually have customers really implementing this.
This is gaining really unprecedented efficiencies by doing this.
It's quite interesting to see the development now having implemented endurance of the head of support, the head of IT operations and other parts of the organization. And certainly Team Forge helps to really very effectively automate those processes from code to build to test and even deployment into operations and one side by being able to leverage also tools such as Hudson or HP Quality Center which might be deployed in organizations.
Really orchestrate continuous integration, but also for developer to ad hoc when needed, provision instantly and servers in the Cloud for build service, for test service, for run service. So, the functionality that we call that management functionality is completely built into the management software of Team Forge to enable this.
Now one other important point - its not just about automating, its also about information. I'd call it continuous information and that's really what it's all about. It's about closing the loop between development, build and test to answer questions such as, which requirements have been addressed by a certain build for example.
What fails really and how does code behave in production, what fails and how do we take action on this and really make insights actionable. For example if there's a failure in production, or in test, or in build, automatically generate an artifact from there, a defect track for example.
Hmm, alright, well let's switch gears for a second and talk about your other announcement. You know I heard about your 10 free user license options. Does this mean that you're giving away software for free now?
Yes indeed, TeamForge is now available also for free and you're correct with a ten user limitation once available, absolutely. for use in production. It has just been released very recently, but we see a very strong uptake and it's really also lessons learned from Subversion Edge, right. CollabNet launched Subversion Edge about a year ago which is the certified binaries for subversion plus a web management consult, plus automated insulation updates as services and we had so far over twenty-four thousand download and not just downloads, actually active productive usages of Subversion.
So we see a very high demand from the download options, and also provides also this TeamForge. The full solution, full ALM, not just a trial and it's available on all the platforms that we have. Linux, Windows or VM.
Well great. It's great to hear about and I can't wait to try it out here in our shop as well too. And if If you would like to hear more about CollabNet, you can visit them on the web at Collab.net and thanks again for visiting me today Lothar. This has been the Crossroads, if you would like to hear more video podcasts like this, you can visit us on the web at CMcrossroads.com
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