Lampitt or Leave It

Agile Software Engineering Dream Team: Starring Atlassian and zAgile!

Wow, Atlassian has done it again! They are following up their overwhelmingly successful "stimulus package" where they sold 5 user licenses of JIRA or Confluence for $5, and they donated more than $100,000 in proceeds to Room To Read.

Atlassian just announced licenses of 10 users for $10 for Atlassian Confluence, JIRA, and other products. And again, proceeds go to to Room To Read.

And with zAgile joining in with our own $10 subscription for 10 users of zAgile Teamwork, when you combine JIRA and Confluence Starter Licenses, small teams have a totally integrated and collaborative software engineering  environment for only $30! Tough to beat that. You can manage Requirements and Test Cases in Confluence, tightly integrated with Projects, Tasks, and Issues in JIRA. Plus with additional Connectors, you can also tightly integrate other tools like version control (Subversion, Perforce, etc.) or continuous build (CruiseControl, etc.). Check it out in the recorded webinar (1 hour) or a quick 10 minute video here. To get started, you can test-drive the whole solution at the zAgile hosted sandbox by simply signing up for an account.

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.

Open Source zAgile Wikidsmart Goes GA - Testdrive It Online or Meet-Up With zAgile

It was great coverage from SD Times a couple weeks ago on how zAgile enables ALM 2.0, and now we just put out a press release on Wikidsmart.  Seems like word is getting out. With Wikidsmart, the ability to pull information from across an organization's tools and applications goes well beyond the confines of the engineering team. Now you can bridge the information gap between engineering, product management, sales, and marketing.

zAgile Wikidsmart just went GA last night, and it's available on SourceForge. I recommend going here for the download instructions. But before you download, you might want to learn more at the Wikidsmart overview page, see some videos of it in action (application interoperabilty or smart search - on the lower right), or even test-drive a hosted version on our sandbox.

When you add Connectors for tools and applications to Wikidsmart, your Confluence wiki will even become an enterprise information dashboard, allowing you to expose any information - and infer informtion - across your tools and applications.

If you would like to learn more in person, we have several events coming up in the Bay Area:
- March 19: Co-Sponsoring the Atlassian User Group in San Jose this Thursday
- March 25: I will be on a panel at OSBC
- April 9: Semantic Web Meet-Up at Atlassian offices in San Francisco

In addition, founder Sanjiva Nath has been asked to be a panelist at Enterprise Data World on April 8 in Tampa Bay, to discuss how enterprise data integration professionals can leverage semantic web technologies for rich information integration across the organization.

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.

Learn How to Apply the Benefits of the Semantic Web to Your Organization Today: Atlassian HQ, April 9 in San Francisco

We are on the cusp of an exciting new era with the Semantic Web. Just as we recall how the web popularized the internet, we are all just about to experience "the new web", one that recognizes the content within any given web page and how it is related to other information on the web. The Semantic Web promises to revolutionize the accessibility of information on the World Wide Web. But until the Semantic Web is a fully implemented and adopted by consumers like "Joe User", how can the benefits of the Semantic Web be applied to your organization today? Semantic wikis hold the answer!

Just as one might argue that Wikipedia is a microcosm of the web, a semantic wiki within your own organization is a microcosm of the worldwide semantic web. Semantic wikis add structure to the wiki enabling the traditional, unstructured content to be complimented with meaningful structure. Now Atlassian Confluence has become an intelligent semantic wiki thanks to an open source semantic web infrastructure called zCALM and a Confluence plug-in called Wikidsmart for Confluence, both from zAgile and free to download from www.zAgile.com. This means the promises of the semantic web can be immediately applied within your organization today, and with open standards and a flexible open source ecoystem.

At the Atlassian headquarters (375 Alabama St in SOMA, cross street 17th) in San Francisco on April 9, 6.30-8.30pm, zAgile will discuss tangible benefits of the Semantic Web and practical ways it can help you to become more efficient, automate processes, and empower your organization. As an example we will discuss and demonstrate zCALM, an open source semantic infrastructure. You will see how zCALM may be used to semantically enable your enterprise wiki (Atlassian Confluence), achieve "intelligent mash-ups" -- deep interoperability and exchange of context-sensitive information between applications (eg, Confluence, Jira, and Subversion - including WANdisco multi-site/cluster versions for Jira and WANdisco for Subversion, Perforce, IBM tools, HP tools, and Salesforce), and even act as a powerful search across your applications and tools.

So come by to learn how you can realize the promises of the semantic web internally in your own organization.  If you cannot make it til later, afterwards, we will move over to a nearby bar called Circolo (500 Florida Street, between 18th St & Mariposa St), around 8.30pm to continue discussions.

We look forward to meeeting you! Please make sure to reserve your spot here. Many thanks to Jessie Curtner, Trisha Hong, and Todd Revolt at Atlassian and Marco Neumann from the New York City Semantic Web Meet-Up for enabling this!

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