June 2017 - kovair.com

Pivotal Tracker allows users to manage projects through Epics, User Stories and related tasks. It also supports estimation to determine the team’s velocity and provides shared expectations of what work will be delivered in well-defined timeframes.

Kovair Omnibus integration with Pivotal Tracker along with other ALM and PPM tools can create a complete lifecycle that enriches the management team and developers to take proper decisions based on the progress made. Kovair Omnibus integration with Pivotal Tracker orchestrates the automation of information flow across multiple tools.

Here are some of the primary benefits of this integration:

Ease of setup: Integration is a simple three-step configuration by using Kovair’s Omnibus web-based UI without writing a single line of code.
Monitoring and acknowledgement systems: The entire integration can be monitored from the Kovair application UI itself. Holistic reports outline the total rate of success or failure in sync all in one place.
More than just a means of integration: Kovair empowers users to do more by syncing relationship links associated with the objects to achieve complete end-to-end traceability. We enable cross-team/cross-phase, multitool, automated workflows that are presently siloed.
Integrate every part of Tracker: All the Pivotal Tracker artifacts can be integrated with other tools for seamless synchronization of data, including all custom work item types, fields, and lookup values.
Adapt with the changing processes and needs: The ESB approach to integration makes it easy to adapt with virtually zero downtime in case there is a version upgrade or even a requirement for a new tool to be integrated with Tracker. All a user needs is to install the Kovair adapter for the new version and execute the three-step setup to get the integration running.
Sync and link with Kovair’s plugin for IDE: Kovair’s plugin for different IDEs help developers to see the associated information from other tools, modify if required, and update status as the task progresses.

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Kovair is working with a vision to help Pivotal tracker users to seamlessly integrate with other tools and is providing this solution as an option to use it over the cloud, as a SaaS solution, or install on premise with an easy-to-afford startup price. Connect with sales@kovair.com for more details.

‘Kovair Pivotal Tracker Integration Adapter’ lets you integrate Pivotal Tracker with other best-of-breed tools such as JIRA, GitHub, Jenkins, CA PPM, Rally etc. By integrating Pivotal Tracker with these tools, organizations can get centralized visibility into its portfolio of IT projects, timelines, and opportunities.

Pivotal Tracker is an agile project management software that guides you for iteration planning of project requirements, helps you break down epics to create stories, estimate and prioritize backlogs, associate related task, provide a real time view into project progress and track team’s velocity, But using an agile planning tool in isolation with variety of other ALM tools being used by other project stakeholders like developers, QA/ testers, operations can create the very problem that ‘Pivotal Tracker’ aims to resolve i.e. delay in delivery, resource optimization.

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Features & Benefits

Allows you to automatically synchronize, epic, stories, task and activities between Pivotal Tracker and other ALM tools.
Eliminates the duplication of entries for projects, epic, stories, activities and tasks.
Provides complete visibility into all project progress & deliverables.
Ensures cross-tool visibility, end-to-end traceability, and process automation.
Provides real-time information and consistent control across a diverse range of ALM tools.
Focus on adopting the best practices.
Supports estimation to determine the team’s velocity and provides shared expectations of what work will be delivered in well-defined timeframes.
Conflict detection and mediation
360° visibility into project progress status, and deliverables.
Bi-directional synchronization of Pivotal Tracker projects, epics, stories, tasks, and activities with other tools.
Robust, reliable, and readily scalable enterprise-class architecture.
Consolidated data collection and reporting to aide project assessment
Support for CI (Continuous Integration)
Faster implementation of Change Requests and Defect resolution.

Kovair Pivotal Tracker integration Adapter

‘Kovair Pivotal Tracker Adapter’ allows one to integrate Pivotal Tracker with best-of-breed 80+ tools in Omnibus ecosystem. Thus, artifacts of Pivotal Tracker like epic, stories, task and activities are can easily be synced to other target tools and vice versa.

When items are created and modified in another connected system, the changes are reflected in target project of Pivotal Tracker. It will always automatically reflect the most up-to-date project status, while other tools can be used as the system of record and engagement for their specialist activities. Omnibus enables the developers to view and update Pivotal Task, User Stories from the IDE itself without moving into another tool. Once code is checked in to SCM like GitHub enterprise, cross tool bi-directional relationship is established and automatic build is fired enabling CI/ CD. Currently, integration for Pivotal Tracker Cloud (Version 1.13.8 0ed5eb7) is supported.

Fig: Kovair Pivotal Tracker Integration Adapter workflow

Why Integrate Pivotal Tracker with Kovair

Agile Planning

With Pivotal Tracker integrated into the eco-system, users can push Epics and User Stories from Pivotal Tracker to Rally and update Feature status in Rally as engineering does their work. Changes in Rally will be immediately reflected in Pivotal Tracker. This bi-directional integration allows senior management to track different project status. This integration allows users to view requirements linked to a specific feature, release or product.

Issue/ Change Management

Changes in requirements are inevitable in product development, and changes need to be managed efficiently to ensure project success. JIRA lets you manage change requests and defects identified and reported by test teams throughout the development lifecycle and have better visibility and control over the development processes. By integrating Pivotal Tracker with JIRA, you can extract JIRA project issues and change requests, replicate and store them Stories as Pivotal Tracker.

Traceability

Relations between artifacts managed in Pivotal Tracker also get synchronized with other tools in the integrated scenario. Events occurring in Pivotal Tracker can be trapped and used to generate one or more actions for other integrated tools. Using Kovair Omnibus platform complete traceability from Project, Epic, and Stories to Task can be tracked through a single interface. Thus allows the senior management to track the status of Projects and Issues. Stories created at Pivotal by syncing JIRA issues will be traced to the original item in Jira through item URL as links in a comment, also one can trace the Pivotal Items at Jira through any comments. Thus bidirectional traceability link between items of two tools can be established.

Key Role in CI/CD

Kovair Omnibus Integration with Pivotal Tracker enables Continuous Integration (CI) for various agile teams working in a distributed fashion. When CI works well, it helps the code stay robust enough that customers and other stakeholders can play with the code whenever they like. Omnibus enables the developers to view and update Pivotal Task, User Stories from the IDE itself without moving into another tool. Once code is checked in to SCM like GitHub enterprise, cross bidirectional relationship is established and automatic build is fired.

Project Metrics

Project progress and performance metrics data can be collected from Pivotal Tracker and displayed in connected tools. These are real time data, coming straight from the source tools being used to manage different functionalities including Requirements Management, Design, Development, Testing and Project Management.

Examples of Pivotal Tracker Integration

Kovair Pivotal Tracker - Rally Integration

As shown in the above example, you can integrate Pivotal Tracker and Rally so that Initiative in Rally are replicated in Pivotal Tracker as Project and Features in Rally are replicated in Pivotal Tracker as Epics and User Stories. Tasks can be generated and prioritized based on the user stories.

CA Clarity PPM – Pivotal Tracker Integration

As shown in the above example, you can integrate CA Clarity PPM with Pivotal Tracker so that Epic in Pivotal are replicated in CA Clarity PPM as high level tasks providing the senior management and PMO a transparent detailed view on current projects, performance trends and help them take better strategic decisions.

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The Client

The client is one of the world’s largest multinational telecommunications conglomerate with headquarters in USA. Its range of services includes networking, mobility, unified communications, cable services and VoIP.

Business Need

The multinational telecommunications conglomerate needed to decommission some of the legacy application like HP ALM, Rally, and JIRA and migrate key business processes and data for customer analytics from its legacy data platform to central IBM Jazz CLM platform. The migration was part of a strategic mandate to consolidate on a single data platform and leverage the platform, which closely aligns to the organization’s business needs, planned operational efficiencies and single version of truth for data analytics. The existing software development tools and data management system did not allow for easy and efficient data access for management reporting. Overall objective is to have a more accessible and comprehensive view of its business data – a 360-degree viewing ability, which would enable it to create and capitalize on increased organizational productivity. This involved an enterprise-wide initiative and the client needed a technology partner to re-engineer the existing customer data from the existing application to a new central CLM application. In addition, the organization identified a large cost incurred by the company on thousands multiple tools license on the heterogeneous applications used by various teams across the organization.

Kovair Role

Skillfully migrating terabytes of data from thousands of projects requires deep understanding of data migrations and the methodologies and pitfalls of such an undertaking. The organization searched for an entity with the experience and know-how to build and deliver on a viable and cost effective solution that would see the organization through the migration process for multi-thousands of projects. The organization found this expertise at Kovair Software with its hybrid version of the QuickSync product that utilized both the QuickSync and Omnibus capabilities on the Kovair Platform.

Kovair Flexible Architecture

The client reviewed several other vendors but the need was to have a platform which is flexible enough to mold as per their business needs seamlessly. The primary features like supporting one to many computed data routing to multiple attributes across multiple projects in the IBM Jazz were a requirement.

Challenges

The relevant data were stored in multiple applications project repositories that did not allow visibility to management in other units. The client’s existing application system included more than 2000 application projects and the challenge was to migrate and perform ongoing sync over the live data without a single minute of downtime. The teams using the existing tools will be moved in a phased manner to the target tools. Since the projects are having millions of data accumulated over the years, the data quality was questionable. With so many projects and 1000’s of simultaneous users accessing live data along with the migration process requires meticulous planning and precision in execution. Since data is business and client cannot afford to lose business, the data quality was of utmost importance. Apart from typical data quality issues, the existing system was also dependent on several other applications and calling programs. This posed added complexity to the migration exercise. Over and above the data volume, the window for data migration was a great challenge as for example 200,000 records of data needed to be migrated in two to three days. Kovair did migrate at a rate of few hundred migrations per minute across multiple work areas with less than 0.1% errors.

The Solution

The Kovair team developed and evaluated 3 technical options to address the migration of the 2000 application projects. After further evaluation and technical discussion, the most suitable option that was identified is a Hybrid solution which is an extension of the Kovair flagship product “The Omnibus Integration Platform” and the Kovair QuickSync product. The solution was prototyped and was tested few hundred times on several test beds. The solution was architected and detailed demos had been provided to the Client’s technical and management leadership

data migration

The Kovair project team devised a comprehensive implementation road map which addressed issues such as cost estimates and milestones for the interface migration and technical analysis of the chosen solution. In the first release, data from one of the major existing customer repositories – HPALM was migrated to the new enterprise component. The team also developed several small applications that operated on top of the enterprise component. The first release was completely managed and developed by Kovair and it can rightfully claim a very successful and flawless data migration execution.

Statistics and Achievements

Over 1.6 million data migrated from 1500 projects of Rally
Over 1.8 million data migrated from 960 applications of HPALM
Migration transaction rates are around 300+ records per minute.
More than 200 Windows boxes took part in migration simultaneously
Migration followed by data synchronization executed while hundreds of end users are working with their respective tools simultaneously.
Entire migration has been executed in over 4 months with zero downtime from end users
Several brainstorming sessions held with IBM Jazz, Rally and other technical teams
Kovair in-house remote monitoring tool for monitoring hundreds of workstations for migration
The platform was built to support SSL, TLS1.1 and TLS 1.2
Less than 0.1% reported issues.

Live Data Statistics

Rally to IBM RTC and IBM RQM

Benefits

The upfront investment in tools and talent as well as costs of manpower of implementing a data management strategy can seem high. When posed against the costs associated with poor data quality, erroneous information, and uniformed decision making, the benefits are very high. The data shows that companies that have implemented central data repositories have generated more revenue and saved more money than companies who have not made the investment.
The client may have achieved savings by negotiating tool costs from one vendor versus multiple vendors besides achieving efficiencies in management visibility and reporting.
Unified CLM repository for 360 degree reporting
Full collaboration between heterogeneous Teams
Easy and fluent collaboration and integration
The client’s enterprise-wide IT objective of gaining an adaptable, central 360-degree view of organizational data was fulfilled and the client could move without much trepidation to newer integrated tools.
The benefits of the new system were quick to manifest across the enterprise and resulted in far greater responsiveness to business changes. This initiative also enabled the client to explore more revenue generating and revenue planning opportunities.
Analyzing trends in order to make informed decision is made simple because a central repository stores large amounts of past data, providing a historical intelligence aspect to decision making

Results

The data migration automation application was streamlined and developed in few weeks, saving the organization from having to rely on the legacy applications with massive license cost. With a Hybrid application to automate the process, the time invested was trimmed to weeks. Finally, the data migration strategy project took place during a major transformation at the organization. As the organization was busy refining the way it approaches a core aspect of its business, it was relieved not to have to manage the project teams or the analytics data migration project. Ultimately a deep experience with data and analytics enabled the customer to focus its resources in the right areas and avoid disruption during a time of major change.

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About the Partner

Assioma.net supports IT in the effective governance of application quality. It offers its customers specialised skills gained through almost thirty years of experience, flexibly organised in an agile structure comprising more than 200 employees. It has shares in leading companies in the market and works with important academic communities in Italy and abroad.

Assioma.net’s customers include very important companies in the sectors of Telecommunications, Industry, Services, Finance and Public Administration.

Assioma.net guarantees its customers experience, professional resources, an in-depth knowledge of the market, and commitment to continuous improvement, ensuring the delivery of truly excellent results.

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