The S Curve

Wikidsmart for OpenStack is Live!

We are proud to announce that zAgile has recently engaged with the OpenStack Foundation to create the Activity Board, powered by Wikidsmart.

OpenStack is a leading open source software platform for building public and private clouds. The OpenStack Foundation drives its evolution and is backed by enterprise leaders include IBM, Cisco, HP, Red Hat, RackSpace, AT&T, VMware, Dell, Canonical, and others.

The development Activity Board for OpenStack provides a visual overview of all the OpenStack public activity of community members across multiple dimensions: contributors and organizations, projects and code-related contributions. From a single interface, you can easily surf OpenStack project content, whether it is coming from the Launchpad bug tracker, Git version control system or Gerrit code review application--all mapped against the OpenStack Foundation members database. 

The intention of the Activity Board is to give the community a way to answer very precise questions like: who’s contributing to that particular project? What is that developer working on? Which commits/changes are related to a particular bug? Who’s joined the development community recently? etc.

And for OpenStack corporate members, an additional benefit you may wish to consider is to integrate your own internal tools with the OpenStack community project content to create your own composite internal dashboard, to provide your teams with instant and precise access to community activity and efforts.   Wikidsmart Context Server’s approach enables you to integrate your tools to automatically build a cohesive view of all content. That means you don’t have to do extensive integration work which can be quite costly to build and maintain.  

If you would like to learn more, we are featuring the OpenStack Activity Board in the upcoming events:

• OpenStack Summit , April 15, Portland, OR: one long session to show the state of the art and to gather feedback

• Webinar, May 2, 9am Pacific Time: Introducing OpenStack Activity Board, A Unified View of OpenStack Project Content 
  

-Sanjiva

A 'Wikidsmart' Project Explorer in Confluence

Since zAgile's Wikidsmart integrates concepts across tools and phases in the software lifecycle, there are a number of ways this integrated information can be leveraged by engineering teams.  Recently, we have had a number of requests to present this information on a confluence page in a tree-like form, analogous to file explorers.   For example, this would allow a tree view of all concepts (version, component, feature, design document, task, test suite, checkin, build, etc.) related to a JIRA project, regardless of where that information exists (Confluence, JIRA, Subversion, Jenkins, Salesforce,...).  The explorer presents the consolidated view of the relationships, much like typical file explorers, such as the Windows Explorer.

We have now developed a widget that can provide this functionality within Confluence.  Its most typical use would be to render all related information about a JIRA Projects.  However, the usage is not limited to any particular 'root' concept.  For example, if you have integrated Salesforce into the Wikidsmart platform, you can see a tree-view of all your CRM Accounts. 

This simple to configure and customize widget macro provides a hierarchical (multi-level) view of JIRA projects and related artifacts, tasks, etc. in the example below.   It supports the following features:

• Customizable -- The root or base concept can be any concept represented in the Wikidsmart knowledge model.  The examples here show root concept as JIRA project.  However, it is possible to have the root as CRM Account, Document or Build, depending upon the context which the page represents.  
• Hierarchical -- execution of the macro will result in the tree-style listing of the root or base concepts.  It will also render the nested relationships in a hierarchy, as specified in the JSON graph.  The logical hierarchy of the example is shown below:

• It can render multiple levels of hierarchical relationships without any constraints, with each level capable of representing heterogeneous concepts 
• It is dynamic and renders all relationships in realtime, as they are established.

 

Here is an example of an implementation of this macro.  It shows a JIRA Project, Features, Components and Test Suites associated with each Project, Stories associated with each Feature, and so on (as shown in the graph above).

 

 

 

To explore this and other features of Wikidsmart, visit the Wikidsmart Sandbox.

 

 You can also download Wikidsmart from Sourceforge.

Confluence 4.1 and Wikidsmart

We have made a lot of progress towards adapting the Wikidsmart smart-forms templates for Confluence to be 'natively compatible' with Confluence 4, leveraging its rich user inteface for creating structured content that can be integrated with other applications and tools, including JIRA, Salesforce, etc.

Since there has been a lot of interest in Wikidsmart for Confluence 4, we thought to provide a sneak peak into what to expect.  The new UI is rich, exciting and inviting.  We are looking forward to the final form within the next few weeks.  

We will continue to provide progress on this towards our goal of releasing the product for Confluence 4 by mid summer.

• The form layout 

 

• The template-based form for structured content entry

 

• The structured page in view mode

-Sanjiva

www.zAgile.com

Atlassian Chats It Up

Kudos to Atlassian for expanding the collaborative and social aspects of the Atlassian suite even further with HipChat. And congrats to the HipChat team for joining Atlassian! Chat is of course a critical aspect to collaboration along with wikis, activity streams, etc. zAgile recognized this as such a few years ago when we integrated the Jabber-based Openfire server into the zAgile Wikidsmart platform.

As always, you can count on zAgile as the Atlassian software vendor partner to contextually integrate Atlassian products. zAgile's Wikidsmart open source platform and applications deliver tight interoperability, traceability, and federated search of content (Requirements, Issues/Tasks, Tests, etc.) across the Atlassian environment, as well as with other tools (Jenkins, Selenium, etc.) and applications (Salesforce.com, etc.). 

And now HipChat's chat history content will be counted among those of course. In this way, HipChat conversations may be automatically tied (via key word/topic association) to issues in JIRA, requirements in Confluence, projects in JIRA, customers in Salesforce.com, etc. No longer will chats remain isolated but can be shared (to the extent desired) and associated with all aspects of the project. 

This means historical chats may be part of the contextual content served to users whenever they are doing something (like creating an issue in JIRA) or performing a search for something. For example, if they are performing a search for a specific Requirement, now they can also see the associated historical conversations along with the associated Tasks/Issues, associated Customers, etc.

The Wikidsmart platform is about teams gaining efficiency and managers gaining insight into the software engineering activities by contextually integrating content and information. Now Atlassian's HipChat's chat history will be amongst that important content to drive collaboration in an ever more contextual way.

@AndrewLampitt
zAgile

zAgile Launches Open Source ALM 2.0 Interoperability Hub

I am pleased to announce that all the power of zAgile's Wikidsmart's infrastructure and applications are now open source. Now all software engineering delivery teams and executives can easily and affordably overcome the problem of disparate teams and tools easily.

Whenever you integrate content, whether it's point-to-point or else with a service bus or traditional data federation layer, you get the same problem. The content is really only mapping data to data with no intrinsic understanding of the process or context of how the data is related. It's essentially dumb mapping. And it's a tedious, expensive effort that is difficult to measure in terms of ROI. So people simply don't do it. And that's why we still have the mess and an additional reason for software delivery deadlines being missed.

The Wikidsmart platform and applications offer the solution. Wikidsmart's core is a context server based on semantic web technologies. I determined that the integrated ALM solution had to have a number of characteristics. First, it had to follow open standards to be approachable to a wider audience. It had to recognize process, metadata, and context all in one. As I did my research, I realized that the WC3 standards body, led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was trying to solve a similar problem for the web. They led the definitions for semantic web technologies in order to interconnect content of the world's websites. I realized that some of those same technologies are the ideal vehicle for integration of content across the enterprise. Finally, we determined that our solution should be open source. Semantic web technologies are not yet widely known, and the open source nature tends to encourage people to experiment, learn, and contribute to extending the solution - and eventually adopt those solutions in a much more widespread way than closed systems would have otherwise. I think Big Data technologies like Hadoop and the NoSQL movement have demonstrated that well. So what we have ended up with at the core of the Wikidsmart platform is the Wikidsmart Context Server, which is an ontology-driven semantic framework that integrates content bi-directionally as a sort of semantic bus.  It serves contextually relevant content from across the enterprise with the application or tool being used by the team member, or contextually composite information for example for an executive dashboard.

Of course, we are speaking of a paradigm shift in the way we think of content, metadata, processes. We went from mainframe to client/server to the internet. Those were all major changes that were inspired by big pains. I think we all agree that the pain is there in content integration. People are still trying to solve the problem with old approaches. People are still thinking SQL and point-to-point application integration primarily. We believe that open sourcing Wikidsmart will hasten its adoption and make the problem of lack of ALM integration a story of the past. I invite you to download <http://www.zagile.com/3/download.html>  today for yourself and check it out.

At the SAP Cloud Community Inside Track Event on Feb 16 in Palo Alto

I am excited to be speaking at this event on Feb 16.  Its an opportunity to share and explore what cloud technologies provide in support of running and management of large-scale, globally distributed software projects. 

Here is the abstract of my talk:

Cloud-based technologies can address a number of challenges involved in running and managing large-scale software projects using globally distributed teams.  They can facilitate consistency of tools used by distributed teams throughout the software development lifecycle, from product definition to delivery.  They can enable integration of heterogeneous tools, processes, participants and stakeholders across lifecycle phases, including customers and support.   They can provide full transparency of all activities.  And finally, they can leverage the elasticity of the cloud to support activity-bursts, such as those used with test automation and continuous build cycles.  This session focuses on zAgile's cloud-based collaboration platform for software devleopment, that brings distributed teams together, providing a cohesive and unified environment with full visibility and traceability to facilitate rapid application development cycles.

Bringing Customer Relationship Management into the organization, with integration of Salesforce, Confluence and JIRA

This video demonstrates zAgile's integration of Salesforce with Confluence and JIRA which brings customer relationship management to the rest of your organization. The integration of these tools enables the entire organization to be on the same page with regards to achieving highest levels of customer service and satisfaction.

Wikidsmart!! Knowledge Management

Wikis have become entrenched in the enterprise as the most common ‘groupware’ application for collaboration amongst individuals and teams.  They are easy to acquire, easy to setup, and easy to use for capturing ad hoc content that teams desire to share amongst themselves.  It is not unusual to find dozens and sometimes even hundreds of wiki instances within enterprises.  Whether it is Human Resources, Sales, Marketing, or IT, teams find ways of leveraging the convenience of wikis to publish and share information with each other.  

While wikis permeate the enterprise, the convenience of capturing information, the ad hoc nature of this information and its lack of structure also contribute to the general failure of the wiki as an effective information collaboration tool.  As the published content grows into hundreds and thousands of pages, it becomes increasingly difficult to organize, maintain, access, and search.  It quickly loses credibility and becomes stale.  Since there is no consistency or discipline with which information must be published or organized, different groups within an organization may experience varying degrees of success with their wiki.  

Traditional wikis also present additional limitations that often constrain their usage as an enterprise groupware application.  These constraints are not a critique of the inherent design of the wiki since it was intended as a simple tool for allowing people to capture information.  We discuss them mostly in the context of the evolution of the wiki in the enterprise.

For example, the page-paradigm for representing content or information does not support ‘formal type’ declaration of specific content in a page or capturing any classification or taxonomic relationship between pages of information.  Rather, it restricts the organization to simple page-level hierarchies.  In multi-dimensional taxonomies, it should even be possible for a page to be represented in more than one classification scheme.  And what about inheritance where information in a page may draw from that already represented in the parent page?  or somewhere else external to the wiki?

Many commercial wikis support information integration from external sources through mashups.  However, the context of such integration is implied based on its location rather than through any formal interpretable relationship with the page where it renders.  There is no inherent capability of dynamically integrating content from external applications based upon page-level context.

Wikis do not support any federation of content.  When there are hundreds of wikis in an enterprise, there is no mechanism for sharing information across them.  Wikis in such scenarios represent team-level and department-level information silos.  

In spite of these shortcomings, wikis have the potential to become an Information or Knowledge Portal within an enterprise and its users demand it.  The emergence of semantic technologies, particularly as applied to wikis (aka Semantic Wikis) has gone a long way to address these gaps.  To further read about the current limitations of wikis and how zAgile’s Wikidsmart semantic technology provides ways of overcoming them, specifically in the context of Atlassian’s Confluence enterprise wiki -- read the whitepaper on Enterprise Knowledge Management with Wikidsmart for Confluence available on Slideshare 

 

Executing JIRA Workflow Tasks from within Confluence using Teamwork 3

Teamwork 3 provides much tighter integration of Confluence with JIRA Workflows using the JIRA XMLRPC API using the zAgile Teamwork plugin for JIRA.   So it is now possible to initiate and interact with JIRA Workflow-based tasks from within Confluence pages and tables.  

However, beyond this user-friendly interaction, the tasks and their states are also automatically linked with the specific entity (Requirement, Test Case, Document, Business Request, Invoice, etc.) in Confluence from where they are initiated (see example below).  

The two-way linking can now provide the users with a friendly interaction with JIRA while achieving full traceability and reporting.  Users  don't need to access JIRA unless they need to edit/update task details.  Since the integration is done using zAgile's zCALM Server, the information may be accessed anywhere in Confluence or JIRA.   For example, you can query the Review Status of a Specific Document or Requirement, or the Test Execution Status of a Test Case using simple queries in the context of the Document, Requirement or Test Case, without having to go to its corresponding JIRA Task.

 

And of course, all of this is highly configurable, since it is accomplished using templates and macros provided with Teamwork.  Visit the Teamwork sandbox to check out this and other features of Teamwork 3.  

Here is how it works:

The screenshot below shows a couple of sample Requirements for Feature (Smart Search) in Confluence.  Each Requirement may have associated Component(s), Stakeholder(s) as well as Review and Development Tasks.  Review Task here is tied to an Approval Workflow in JIRA.  The same can be done for Implementation Tasks.

Product Managers or Business Analysts defining these Requirements above can "Initiate" Review Sessions, and register the resulting outcome (Approved/Deferred, etc.) with the Requirement.  Clicking on the "Initiate Review" Button against the Requirement 2 above will result in the automatic creation of a JIRA Task for Requirement Approval and return the Task link along with its possible next states as shown below.

 

From here, it is possible to take next actions against the Task, without interacting directly with JIRA.  

 

 

I will be speaking at SemTech 2010 - June 21-25 in San Francisco

A Jena-based Framework for Semantic Enterprise Information Integration (SEII)

EII (Enterprise Information Integration) and MDM (Master Data Management) have been the leading strategies in large enterprises for data integration across business functions. Initiatives driven by these strategies have been deployed successfully and proven effective in providing data consistency to business units as well as reducing costs of data maintenance. They also provide powerful analytics and business intelligence capabilities.

Semantic web technologies can offer a powerful complement to EII. Through the implementation of application-specific, collaboration and process ontologies, integration transcends from application data to the semantics of that data. Repositories may be central or federated across the enterprise - but they still provide a unified view of information. This level of semantic information integration may be tool or application-agnostic, domain-specific and easy to implement via a supporting framework.

This presentation discusses a Jena-based architecture for semantic enterprise information integration. This architecture has been implemented to integrate collaboration and tools within software engineering. It is also equally applicable in other areas. The resulting semantic information network can provide unique dashboards to decision makers.

In this session, we will address the following:

• EII versus Semantic EII (SEII)
• Role of ontologies and metamodels in SEII
• A framework for SEII based upon Jena
• Proposed connector architecture for integrating applications and tools
• Demo