CollabNet today is releasing an update to its flagship TeamForge platform for collaborative ALM that includes TeamForge Orchestrate, a control center for monitoring the connection of disparate tools and activities.
Tools for software development today require the ability to accommodate multiple processes, multiple tools and multiple teams across disparate geographies, according to Lothar Schubert, senior director of product marketing at CollabNet. With its hosted offering, CollabNet can tie into private data centers as well as other cloud solutions through its use of open-source technologies, he said.
“We’re building a new foundation,” he said. “The agile life cycle is build, test [and] deliver, with Git, Jenkins and Chef. Customers want to embrace those technologies.”
Chris Clarke, vice president of product management at CollabNet, said Orchestrate “takes our value proposition of connecting disparate tools to the next level.” Agents are used to capture transactional data between tools, and that data is held in a NoSQL data store to give a centralized view of what’s going on, he explained. That view manifests as an activity stream, “kind of like a Facebook wall for your project,” he said, to which social metadata can be added, as the tools themselves don’t have innate social capabilities.
The software, Clarke added, “offers breakthrough traceability” and acts as “a forensic explorer in mixed-mode, multi-tool situations. There are so many integration points and do-it-yourself shots that a community-based extensibility approach is really the only way to go.”
Today’s launch set includes integrations between TeamForge, Subversion, Git, Jenkins, TeamCity, Crucible and Review Board, Clarke said, and it will include Chef and UC4 in the next iteration. “We’re picking tools we think are winners and those we encounter in our customer base,” he said.
Clarke added that CollabNet will rapidly expand the offering downstream into DevOps, “to take on the whole continuous delivery thing. We want to offer customers freedom of choice without compromising visibility, traceability and governance.”
In the updated TeamForge 7, CollabNet is including an adaptive planning board that can be used for any development methodology and is integrated within a native ALM platform. Actual artifacts can be created from the plan, making them actionable as tasks for developers.
New prepackaged dashboards give users views across projects, tools and clouds, Clarke added, and new one-click navigation makes the execution of workflows around 3x faster, he claimed.
