Lampitt or Leave It

Metadata is the New Application

“The more I think about it, the more I like the concept: #Metadata is the new
software.”
- @GartnerTedF, Ted Friedman, Gartner Analyst for Data Management and Integration

I was excited and inspired upon reading this tweet. I think Ted is pointing out that the real key to any enterprise information solution, rather than any innovative client presentation or visualization layer, is about getting and managing data as usable information. Rather than a fancy GUI of the application/software, the right data is the the ultimate goal, and the path to that is a metadata-driven approach. Of course I may going off in another tangent than what Ted was intending. I do not believe he has yet provided more detail, but I look forward to his elaboration.

At any rate, I will continue with my interpretation and ideas. My view is that metadata is key to this, but it’s only part of the story. That’s because mapping concept X in System 1 to concept Y in System 2, using metadata is only a “dumb connection.” And the mission is more than about data; the true goal is information. So really, we need more than even just metadata. The mission is about CONNECTING systems and CONTEXTUALLY retrieving ONLY appropriate content. That's quite a challenge today since you need to map, in a point-to-point fashion nearly every permutation of metadata connections in order to answer any ad hoc question that might arise, or to deliver any contextual content. That’s a lot of spaghetti integration to manually code and certainly it's impossible to maintain with any realistic budgets today.

Unless an ontology is used for the specific business domain(s) at hand.

For those unaware, ontology in the information sciences domain, according to Wikipedia “is a formal representation of the knowledge by a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to describe the domain.” Therefore, an ontology goes far beyond the concepts simple metadata, or even a dictionary or taxonomy.

With an ontology, metadata, business rules, processes, behaviors, relationships are embedded together. And the ontology acts as an overlay for existing systems without being invasive to those systems. Therefore, the ontology now becomes the heart of powerful new applications, in the spirit of Ted's quote above. Of course a client layer GUI is required to interact with the ontology which then interacts with the source systems (tools and applications). But most of the logic, business rules, and metadata are indeed within the ontology.

All sounds great theoretically, but can a solution really exist? Actually it already does. zAgile Teamwork illustrates just such a solution. With an ontology, using semantic web standard technologies, based on an industry standard metamodel for software engineering, zAgile Teamwork integrates not just the metadata but the concepts of Projects, Requirements, Tasks, Isses, Test Cases, Check-ins, Customer Support Cases, and more. Therefore, ad hoc queries, faceted searches, and contextual content can all be served in a consistent fashion.

With zAgile Teamwork, powerful new metadata driven applications are possible thanks to the software engineering ontology and framework under the covers. The real magic is indeed this middleware of the solution and the GUI can be any new or existing application or tool. For example using a template within a wiki, now Requirements can be captured in a structured way inside the wiki and tied to Projects, Issues, and Tasks in an issue managment system. Likewise Test Cases can be created in the wiki and similarly and automatically tied to appropriate concepts. And for example, do you want to know what Customer Cases in Salesforce.com are connected to a Task, or Issue in JIRA or a Requirement in the Confluence wiki? Yes, there’s a Connector for that too. In fact, all you have to do is add a Connector for whatever tool or application you have, and you can INSTANTLY integrate all knowledge of all connected systems. Too good to be true? Learn more here and give zAgile Teamwork a spin today and see for yourself.

zAgile Teamwork v1.2 is Generally Available

zAgile Teamwork v1.2 is now generally available for download here*.

*Note: Please make sure to email your Confluence and JIRA server IDs to 'sales at zAgile point com' so that we may provide the evaluation or customer license for your specific environment.

zAgile Teamwork includes three main components, and the new features are listed under each of the following sections. (for an overview of other features, check out the zAgile product feature table):

1) zCALM (zAgile Cohesion for Application Life-cycle Management): integration infrastructure, including semantic framework and software engineering knowledge model (other knowledge models, or "ontologies" can be plugged in for different domains)

•    Background reasoning and indexing
•    Inferred model is separate from base and is persisted in the database
•    Significant performance and scalability enhancements 

2) Wikidsmart Connector (wiki connector): semantically enables Confluence wiki from Atlassian.

•    Additional macros for improved template/form layout
•    Support for Table-Plus macro for improved rendering of query results
•    Improved user interface for "Smart Search", to instantly find precise content. Check out the video (requires log-in).
•    Confluence 3.0 Support
•    Support for ARQ extensions

3) JIRA Connector: JIRA issue tracker from Atlassian.

For a review of zAgile Teamwork and a 10 minute video, check out my last blog.

Maximum Efficiency and Predictability in Agile Software Engineering with JIRA and Confluence

Tired of late night phone conferences, countless e-mail threads, and way too many meetings to keep everyone in synch? Want to maximize the  efficiency of your agile software engineering processes?

Then check out the new 10 minute introduction video of zAgile Teamwork. We show you how to have a tightly integrated agile software engineering environment using Atlassian's Confluence and JIRA. zAgile provides the  "glue" to integrate any software engineering tool: issue tracker, wiki, version control, continuous build, etc.

Out of the box you have all the key pieces to handle:

- Requirements and Test Cases in Confluence: zAgile provides "smart templates" that allow you to capture these key concepts in a structured way PLUS tie them to Projects, Issues, and Tasks in JIRA.  And you can pull in information from JIRA as desired.

- Issues, Tasks, Projects in JIRA: this is the standard JIRA capability, and zAgile adds the ability to tie content directly to wiki and other tool content, and expose that external content inside JIRA

So why spend a fortune on IBM (Jazz / TeamConcert), Microsoft (Team Foundation Server), and Oracle (BeeHive) to make their own tools work together and also with external tools? zAgile delivers a highly affordable and open way to integrate information across your environment. That means you achieve:

- optimal efficiency with integrated phases of software engineering (agile, or otherwise)

- high predictability

- extreme traceability of Requirements

Take zAgile for a spin today at our hosted sandbox, and download to use in your own environment.

For a more detailed look at zAgile Teamwork, check out the 1 hour recorded Atlassian webinar.

zAgile Kicks off Roadshow by Hosting Semantic Web Meet-Up at Atlassian in San Francisco

Last night, we had a great turnout for the Semantic Web Meet-Up in San Francisco at the Atlassian offices in San Francisco. (The San Francisco meet-up is now the fastest growing semantic web meet-up group in the State; thanks to Marco Neumann, founder of the original 700+ strong group in NYC for driving the success of the groups across the country!) zAgile brought in Sorrano's pizza (highly recommended), and it was a crowd pleaser. Many thanks to Atlassian for agreeing to host at their location and particularly Trisha Hong for her great organization and work on logistics.

Sanjiva Nath , zAgile founder and CEO, delivered a presentation on the promises and tangible benefits of the semantic web. Importantly, he described that a "semantic approach" does not necessarily mean that semantic web technologies are being used. He described how you can practically apply semantic-web driven solutions today in your organization. Sanjiva presented some examples with Wikidsmart for Confluence, which turns the Confluence enterprise wiki into a semantic wiki allowing the ability to capture information in a consistent way, automate content and links generation, and find precise information quite quickly.

In addition you can "plug in" any other tools and applications with Connectors to the underlying zAgile infrastructure, called zCALM, and have a coherent semantic search across all applications and tools as well as deep interoperability amongst all applications.

We look forward to the upcoming Semantic Web meet-ups during the April zAgile USA Roadshow including an astounding 160+ signed up for the PAWS meet-up in Palo Alto on Tuesday. We look forward to seeing you there, and after the USA roadtrip is complete, we want to organize the same for Europe. Drop us a line at info at zagile point com to learn more.

March 19, San Jose: zAgile Co-Sponsoring Atlassian User Group

We hope you can join us and our friends at CustomWare in San Jose, CA on March 19 at the San Jose Art Museum. Already looks like a great crowd signed up.

Please make sure to register here.

SD Times Recognizes zAgile's "No Tools, Open Source" Approach to ALM 2.0

It's quite a nice way to end the week with some great coverage from Jeff Feinman of SD Times.

Some of the more salient points that Jeff captured:

• When it comes to application life-cycle management, zAgile is saying, “Tools? We don’t need no stinkin’ tools!” That is the calling card of the latest company on the ALM block to offer an integration bus that allows for third-party development software. However, zAgile solely facilitates the use of outside development software, not its own.
• “We interpret ALM 2.0 as information sharing among the various products, and that’s what software information management means.”
• zAgile provides an open-source semantic framework, an integration bus that allows tools and methodologies from all companies. It touts the notion of software information management, which the company defines as the integration and management of information associated with all phases and aspects of the software engineering life cycle. The company gives real-time dashboards that track the performance of those tools.
• “We don’t get into the methodology or process religion: Is waterfall better than agile methods?” Lampitt said. “We accommodate the processes as to what the organization has. The one tool we do have is a process definition tool, where you capture the processes, and then you can instantiate your tools with projects corresponding to that methodology.”

And on our open source approach:

• In talking about the benefits of an open-source ALM framework, Lampitt said, “You’re not paying anything until you’ve proven it out in your own organization. You download it and say, ‘I know I need some integration, but I don’t feel like putting down a couple hundred thousand dollars just to see if it works.’

Finally, a nice summary quote by founder, Sanjiva Nath:

• “People were always trying to improve process, but I felt there were four things that ultimately make software endeavors happen successfully: community, knowledge, process and collaboration. I tried to envision a platform that brings all of this together, but not one that offers people a new set of tools, because there are 20,000 of them out there.”

Achieving an Enterprise Information Portal with Social Networking and Deep Contextual Integration

I read with great interest an article from eWeek, authored by Pringo's Majid Abai, entitled "How Enterprise Information Portals and Social Networking Are Converging."  I think Majid is right on the money, and his comments are quite close to zAgile's vision.

In the past, I recognized how zAgile's vision matches up well with emerging trends including: Unified Collaboration, information sharing, semantic discovery, social networking, contextual computing, and the surge in mash-ups.

The thing that intrigues me is that it seems that not many people are putting together the critical idea, that comprehensive, contextual, enterprise collaboration requires a mastery of data and more specifically, that's about semantic data. Certainly SOA / web services are great for connecting data from point A to point B, but if every time you must define all the meta data characteristics of A & B and how they are related, you waste a lot of time, you will get inconsistencies, and you still won't be able to infer meaning with respect to A & B concepts, let alone how they relate to C.

This is why ontology-driven solutions for any kind of enterprise collaboration will become so obviously critical in the coming couple years. The point-to-point hacks will no longer be enough. What is required is an enterprise, contextual, structured foundation, which semantically plugs together all collobartion tools, social networking tools, engineering tools, CRM, and other applications. Ideally, the solution should use semantic web standards and be open source with an open source ecosystem of stanadardized connectors. This is what zAgile delivers.

zAgile Goes Open Source - Announces Public Beta of Wikidsmart v1.0 for Confluence

I am pleased to announce that zAgile is going open source with its first publicly available product, the v1.0 Beta of Wikidsmart for Confluence, under the GNU Affero GPL v3.  Wikidsmart turns Confluence into a "semantic wiki." The Wikidsmart v1.0 Beta is available here for download. This entitles you to download and use Wikidsmart freely within your organization. Any time a modified version of the binary product is made available to the public, the code with its modifications needs to be also made available to the public.

Whereas a wiki provide an easy mechanism for users to collaborate, develop, and maintain documentation and other content within an enterprise, its inherent wiki characteristics also come with some natural limitations:
- Content organization is limited to mostly page-level hierarchies (though Confluence can help alleviate this with Spaces)
- Content Categorization may be implied in the page hierarchy but there is no inherent structure to support it
- No wiki page attributes or meta data
- Limited interoperability with other applications
- Static versus Dynamic Content

This open source license is great for your organization because there are no obligations to purchase a license, and you can prove out Wikidmart’s use in your organization, risk-free, to:
-    Use semantically enabled forms to capture information in a consistent way across your user base. This ensures easy, consistent data entry that is “semantically” understood for easy cohesion across all systems other than the wiki
-    Automate content exchange between systems rather than manual updates which can create bottlenecks in engineering operations and outdated and/or erroneous information
-    Turn your Wiki into a Knowledge Repository that captures information across your tools and applications

A detailed description of Wikidsmart and its approach may be found here.

Today, the Wikidsmart Beta v1.0 is available for the Atlassian Confluence enterprise wiki. Please contact us if you would like to use zAgile with other wikis including MediaWiki, Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS) Wiki, MindTouch Deki, SocialText, or others.

Wikidsmart is the first of three zAgile products; the others include zPortal and zComposer which are both available as early adopter releases upon request from zAgile at info@zagile.com

Software Engineering Execs: Scale-Up Engineering in a Downturn with Lower Costs? Are you Crazy?

As I walked to work today, I noticed the sky falling. Quite a sight, always wondered what was keeping it up. Turns out nothing. Well, it seems we are being led to believe that with all the recent economic downturn news of doom and gloom.

IT budgets are being slashed. And a recent survey shows half of all CIO's are having a hard time showing their value. It seems that 1 in 4 IT jobs are moving overseas, and apparently they are moving less and less to the BRIC countries. So how are a software engineering and professional services executives to deal with all this chaotic change while budgets are down and demands increase?

Wouldn't it be great if you could scale up your engineering team at will, while being confident that processes are adopted consistently and can be measured, no matter how geographically dispersed your teams are? Heck if you could add engineering resources in other countries at a lower cost while still maintaining your highly crafted processes and methodologies, that would be good, wouldn't it? That's where zAgile can help.

And wouldn't it be great if you could tie sales opportunities, to business requirements to what was actually built, so that the sales and engineering teams could show their mutual value and cohesion, all in a real-time dashboard setting. Yes, zAgile can help there too.

And it sure would be great if your key engineers could focus on buiding rather than plugging together their software engineering requirements with issue tracking, version control, project management, etc. How many hours are lost per month and what efficiencies could you gain if everything were automated? That's where zAgile can help also. Here's an example.

All of these are zAgile's value propositions. Gaining efficiencies in the processes, tools, and teams you already have, while making it easy and inexpensive to scale your teams to new heights.

A Success Story For An Integrated Software Engineering Environment

I’m delighted to share with you about a zAgile customer success story. Market6, the technology leader in retail “last mile” supply chain software, has successfully deployed zAgile’s innovative software to integrate their teams, tools, and processes. The solution includes contextual integration of the Atlassian Jira issue & bug tracking system with the Confluence wiki to create a lightweight requirements management solution. To achieve this, one of the cool zAgile tricks involves turning Confluence into a semantic wiki, in order to capture requirements with semantic forms in the wiki. Those requirements are then instantiated into corresponding workflows in Jira by initiating appropriate Tasks and Subtasks associated with Feature Specification, Development and Testing. Try doing that with any other wiki out there! Not so easy, but with zAgile, it’s a snap to make a semantic wiki out of Confluence, Socialtext, Jive Clearspace Traction, MindSpring, MediaWiki, and other wikis. In addition Market6 wanted to have an easy front-end to applications such as Jira for their professional services and other non-engineering teams so that they could store and track issues in Jira without having to take time to ramp up to learn all the Jira terminology, workflows, and bells & whistles. With a zAgile portal, everyone now has an easy front-end to create and track issues and tasks pertaining to their projects, as well as a composite application to act as the single point of entry to all their applications. The next phase of the deployment involves integration of Subversion version control, GreenHopper (project planning for Jira), and ThoughtWorks CruiseControl (continuous build) together with Confluence and Jira, for an integrated environment. It was quite rewarding to see Market6’s reaction:

the zAgile infrastructure automatically “recognizes” the applications, their functions, and how they are related to one another, for a deep, contextual integration.

I invite you to read zAgile’s case study of Market6 to learn more. And hats off to Market6 for staying ahead of the curve on technology to reduce their costs and improve efficiencies, especially important in today’s challenging economic climate.