Tasktop's Task Federation™ provides a set of tools that enable integration, visibility and traceability across heterogeneous ALM tool stacks.

Task Federation capabilities augment your existing ALM server investments with our robust server-based solution.

This is achieved by leveraging the thriving ecosystem of Tasktop and Mylyn integrations that are based on a de facto standard open source platform.


Tasktop's initial Task Federation solution provides bi-directional, high fidelity synchronization between HP ALM and Quality Center and IBM Rational Team Concert. Look for other synchronizations between Tasktop Certified Connectors to be added over time.

The components of the Task Federation solution that can be adopted as a whole or individually include:

  • IDE Integration - Tasktop provides developer IDE integrations for Eclipse and Visual Studio, connecting software production with project planning and analysis. The IDE integration provides unified access to multiple ALM systems such as defect trackers and Agile project management systems. Learn more about IDE integration for Eclipse or Visual Studio.
  • Cross-repository Linking - Create dependencies and other relationships between tasks across multiple ALM systems (repositories) for visibility and traceability when multiple teams and ALM products are involved in a project.
  • Cross-repository Agile Planning - Tasktop uniquely provides planning support that spans across multiple vendors' solutions. The Tasktop Agile Planner provides a developer-focused iteration planner and scrum-style task board natively in the Eclipse IDE. The planner enables planning using your existing ALM systems with visibility into cross-repository dependencies that exist across multiple products and servers. Learn more.
  • Task-focused Version Control - Connect source code commit information with defect and project management systems to create traceability between source code and the defect, story or requirement that was associated with each code change.
  • Task-focused Continuous Integration - Integrate build systems with the IDE and create traceability between specific builds and the ALM tasks that were modified for that build. This provides an unprecedented level of visibility between tasks, source code and builds.
  • On-Demand ALM Synchronization - Take advantage of existing ALM connectors to set up bi-directional replication or synchronization between your ALM systems.
  • Task Aggregation - Provides business stakeholders who use PPM tools with visibility and accountability at the software engineering level through aggregated data and reporting.


On-Demand ALM Synchronization

On-Demand ALM Synchronization is a key component of Task FederationTM for large enterprises where there is a growing need to provide bi-directional replication or synchronization capabilities between the various tools used in software development, management, and quality assurance. For example, Tasktop provides synchronization between requirements and defects in the HP ALM product with IBM's Rational Team Concert to further unify the ALM stack beyond IDE integration and cross-repository planning.


HP ALM defects are easily synchronized with IBM Rational Team Concert defects


By deploying On-Demand ALM Synchronization with your Tasktop rollout, Tasktop bi-directionally synchronizes all the key tasks and fields between RTC and Quality Center so that RTC has all the information needed for planning while Quality Center remains the system of record for quality management. Each Tasktop client has the full federation capability and uses Mylyn's hardened bi-direction synchronization functionality and user interface, this solution can be deployed in a scalable and secure fashion without requiring any new servers or losing the traceability, security and audit capabilities in RTC or Quality Center.

Tasktop Sync

For clients who require server-side integration, Tasktop Sync is a Task Federation broker that ensure the synchronization is handled automatically without any user-initiated action.

The most popular on-demand ALM synchronization are currently for HP ALM or Quality Center, Atlassian's JIRA, Microsoft TFS, and IBM Rational Team Concert. Additional synchronizations between other Tasktop Certified connectors are available and can be provided upon request.

For more information or to augment your Tasktop Dev Enterprise rollout with the On-Demand Synchronization or other Tasktop Task Federation capabilities, please contact us.