BC Business
Countless hours are wasted at work due to inefficient communication between departments. Mik Kersten, CEO and co-founder of Vancouver-based Tasktop Technologies Inc., has set out to solve this very human problem, at least for software developers.
Kersten and his team created a tool to help companies with large software development divisions track their time and tasks more effectively from the creation phase all the way to testing and delivery. Typically, developers use what’s known in the industry as application lifecycle management, or ALM, tools to help developers, testers and other staff organize and coordinate their work. Larger companies might use a number of such systems; Boeing, for example, might use one from Microsoft and another from HP. These systems don’t always communicate with each another, leaving teams out of sync, with constantly evolving requirements lost in the translation from idea to a final software product.
Tasktop created software that allows management systems for software developers to integrate and communicate more efficiently. They’re the first company to connect disparate software-development systems, up to 70 at a time, and the first to market in this area, according to Rizwan Kheraj, the industrial technology adviser for the National Research Council’s IRAP program at SFU who has worked with Tasktop since its inception. “You can think of them as the Switzerland of ALM systems,” Kheraj says. “They’re sort of the arms dealer that deals with multiple conflicts.”
Since its launch in 2008, Tasktop has continually expanded its efforts to quell conflicts in the software world. An earlier version of its software called Mylyn, released for free as open source, is downloaded two million times a month.
Tasktop counts such Global 2000 corporations as IBM and Microsoft among its clients and has doubled staff and revenue in the past 18 months.