First attendance to TuleapCon 2017

Today, I had been invited to attend TuleapCon 2017. Ok, nothing to do with the Open Source Summit (formerly LinuxCon) with regards to size 😉 And it was just one hour drive from Grenoble ! But it was focussing on the Tuleap ALM solution, and was proposing customer testimonies so I was tempted to attend. Also because I know the CTO of Enalean, Manuel Vacelet, who demonstrated Docker to me during an excellent meetup he was leading and I was sure that he would again be very interesting to hear him expose the technology they develop.

And I wasn’t wrong 🙂 Some 40 people attended the event, testimonies were given by Airbus, Orange, CEA, ST Microelectronics, each time with very large user base and different use cases demonstrating the versatility of the tool. Also some integration work with other tools were demonstrated and explained.

What is impressive, is that today you can find such a company developing a solution and proposing it under the GPL. It’s so rare it needs to be underlined, and the spirit of the team is obviously influenced positively by that. Then they have some strong advantages wrt other ALM I’ve been able either to use or to consider: the methodolgy used to develop the software is a parameter of Tuleap. So you can decide to use a waterfall approach or Scrum or Kanban (the last one was unknown to me but the virtual posti-it dashboard sems not only nice but effective). And the other impressive aspect is that they do not only talk about automation, but they’re paranoid about it, and that’s really nice to see at that point in operation for software development.

So is everything nice and shiny. Well yes, but as with every powerful tool, you need time to become comfortable with it. At least that was my impression after playing a bit with it. I’m sure you’ll get rewarded, and I’m looking at the possibility to replace my old trac instance with it to be able to go further in the automation on my own projects. Not for tomorrow, but something to add to the TODO list 😉 (and no, you don’t want to see that !!)

Another nice aspet is their Open Roadmap offering: In short it’s a mutualization process to get features developed. And that’s not only clever, but again efficient. Of course, you need some large corporations to sustain the model, but that will alow at the end even more sharing around their platform by the users. More companies should adopt that.

And it was also interesting to see the work they are doing with StackStorm to enable a smooth cooperation between many automation tools. I think our Alexandria idea should be moved to this framework and benefit from all the existing integration. We would “just” need to add an iTop package to StackStorm, and a Redfish one, and most of what we try to do would be there.

BTW, the idea of combining the iTop CMDB and the Tuleap ALM to have a fully software defined and automated data center is really an apealing one. Will try to make that happen somehow 😉

So great day, learned a lot, so a useful day, lots of new ideas in mind, definitely worth the time, and if you want to experiment yourself, then attend the RMLL next week and we can all talk together as they will be around as well as myself ! And the last idea would be to convince them to use Continuous Packaging for Tuleap with Project-Builder.org 😉

Tags: ALM, Event, Open Source, Tuleap