Archive for the ‘software factory’ Category

Redmine 0.8.0 RC is out!

Monday, December 8th, 2008

More details and download available here

Amongst other things, it includes cross project search, calendar and gant with issue filtering, editable watchers list, and many more…

Mylin Generic Web Connector used for Redmine

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Mylin (Previously an eclipse plugin called Mylar) is a part of eclipse that allows developers to define and use tasks inside eclipse, and link those tasks to code, code changes, etc.
Mylin tasks can be localy defined in Eclispe, but the main interest of Mylin is that it can be integrated with issue-tracking systems. You can then get your lists of bugs from your issue tracking tool in an eclipse view, and change your ticket statuses from eclipse.

Several connector already exist (Jira, bugzilla, Trac, Mantis), but I was looking for an integration with Redmine. Fortunately, Mylin also provides a Generic Web Repository Connector, allowing the integration with any web issue tracking tool (given some constraints on how issue pages can be accessed).
Basically, you customize it for the tool of your choice by specifying URLs displaying your issue query results, issue details, and also a pattern (defined as a regular expression) that Mylin will use to parse the result web page and deduce the issues to display in eclipse. The connector also provides customization options to manage login into the issue trakcing system.

After maybe half an hour to figure out the right URL patterns and regular expression (I definitely need some practice with regexp…), I had my Redmine tasks in eclipse and I could display several groups of tasks (for V1.2 and V2.0) :

From there, I can right-click on a task to open the details in eclipse and modify a task :

The good news is that this can be used with any issue tracking system that has a simple enough web interface to allow Mylin to query urls and parse the resulting page to get ticket descriptions.

Redmine rocks!

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Last summer I took a look at Redmine, an open source collaborative tool written in Ruby on Rails (cf article on Valtech Blog). I’m currently starting to use Redmine for one project I’m involved in, and I’m promoting it on several other projects at my client.

I was previously a great fan of Trac, and Redmine does now provide real advantages. It provides most of Trac features (issue tracking, wiki, roadmap, code repository browser and links between these modules), plus additional modules : News, discussion forum, basic time tracking associated with issue tracking, generation of changelog, calendar view.

In addition to completely new modules, Redmine also provides a very slick interface. For example tickets can be updated in batch mode. This is really useful for instance when allocating tickets to milestones of the project (in agile jargon, you would use this for your sprint backlog definition). Code changes related to issues appear on the issue page, as well as related issues. Moreover, you can specify keywords like “fixes” or “closes” so that tickets get closed automatically when you check-in code with a comment including “fixes #123″.

Redmine is inherently multi-project (projects and one level of sub projects) and provides all its administration configuration in a web interface.
The administration interface includes custom field definition, custom workflow, permissions, integration with 6 code repositories, LDAP, etc. It provides quite advanced features : for example, when defining a custom field, you can just tick a checkbox to make this field searchable, mandatory, or make it appear in query criteria. You can even define a regular expression that the field must conform to.
Redmine modules (wiki, ticket tracking, news, forum, etc.) can be activated or de-activated per project. Each project can also choose whether to use custom fields or specific issue trackers with custom workflow.
Also, Redmine can be installed in minutes, it just requires Ruby on rails and a database (mySQL by default).

Redmine architecture allows the definition of plugins. A generic Continuous Integration plugin to obtain build results from RSS feeds already exist, as well as a plugin to display a google calendar as one tab in Redmine projects.
The product is already integrated with 6 version management systems : SVN, CVS (Not available in Trac), Mercurial, Bazaar, Darcs, Git.

And the cherry on top of the cake : even if there is no Mylin integration available specifically for Redmine, you can use Mylin’s Generic Web Repository Connector to get your Redmine tickets in Eclipse.

In terms of references, Redmine is used for building the next version of Typo3 (a Major open source CMS).

SVN Notifier

Friday, August 31st, 2007

I just discovered SVN Notifier that allows to watch a subversion repository. This utility from tigris (they also build subversion) displays an icon in your system tray and pops up when other people commit new versions in the repository you want to watch.

You can configure notifications for repositories or sub-folder, and then update your local view from the tool when you get notified of new commits.
It does not allow to automatically update your local view without manual intervention, which might be useful in some cases (but you can easily plan task invoking svn commands to do that).

Useful when the SVN server is not linked to a web interface supporting RSS, like Trac or webSVN.