ThoughtWorks Studios 'Mingles' with Google Wave
Google wants developers to consider using its new Wave messaging platform for collaboration on software development projects -- and Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) tool maker ThoughtWorks Studios thinks that's a good idea.
The two companies took the stage at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco to demonstrate an integration of ThoughtWorks Studios' Mingle project management tool with Google Wave.
A Google "wave" is a real-time, shared communications stream designed to combine email, chat, online conversations, and documents into a single, interactive collaboration platform. It was unveiled in May at the Google I/O conference, and it's currently in beta. Forrester senior analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond characterized Google Wave as an example of a "Web interaction platform" that brings together multiple communication channels. The platform makes it possible for conversations to move from one channel to another without friction. It's similar in concept, Hammond said, to Unified Communications in the telco world.
Google Wave product manager Gregory D'Alesandre, who gave the keynote, called it "a real-time collaborative platform" and "an authenticated real-time communications infrastructure for the Web." The integration with Mingle, he said, demonstrates how Google Wave can enable "a new level of collaboration between enterprise software developers and the end customers using these services."
Mingle is the project management piece of ThoughtWorks Studios' Adaptive ALM suite, which includes the Twist test automation tool and the Cruise release management tool. The conference demo showed how software development organizations can use the Mingle tool to add structure and metadata to conversations carried on in a Wave.
ThoughtWorks Studios is an independent division of ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with a focus on agile software development. The company's adaptive ALM is an approach that allows development teams to use the methods they prefer, while supporting best practices, said Cyndi Mitchell, the company's vice president of strategy.
"We have a lot of experience building applications," Mitchell said. "And we noticed that the tools that were out there were lagging behind this adaptive concept and what was really needed to do agile software development. So when we set up Studios, we determined to build our tools with the idea that we should adapt to the way software development teams work, rather than forcing them to adapt to the way that our tools work."
Mingle is built on Ruby on Rails, and in 2007 became the first commercial application to run on the JRuby Java implementation of Ruby. Because Mingle is engineered in JRuby, Mitchell said, it can be deployed easily into large corporate IT environments with big investments in the Java platform without the need for additional platforms and tools.
ThoughtWorks Studios was one of three companies demoing software integrations with Google Wave at the conference: Novell showed off a real-time, enterprise collaboration platform called "Pulse," which it plans to integrate with Google Wave; and SAP demoed an application called "Gravity," through which users collaborate on creating and modeling business processes.
ThoughtWorks Studios also used the conference to unveil Mingle 3.0, a major release of the product scheduled to go live in December. Along with the Google Wave integration and other improvements, this release introduces a new online team collaboration platform the company calls "Murmurs." The platform captures unstructured communications, such as IM chats and emails, and associates these "conversations" with Mingle project artifacts. The first external integration of Murmurs uses Jabber chat.
"It's kind of a cross between group chat and Twitter," said Chad Wathington, the company's vice president of product development. "It's a way to broadcast information to your entire product team in a central stream of conversation."
The Murmurs platform will also come with an API, Wathington said, which will add programmatic communications to the stream. "I can say, for example, that when a build fails, it gets murmured into the stream," he said.