Codendi

After a (too long) interruption, the Codendi blog is back again.

New theme, new organisation, new functionnalities, …

Feel free to share your feedback.

Some old posts with interest will be added from times to times for your convenience.

Today, I would like to inform you about the new Codendi ProEdition package we offer from this week.

This package lets you to benefit from the Codendi ProEdition capabilities with one year of patches, upgrades and access to the new releases.

It is a bargain package for companies that installed the Community Edition for evaluation and would like to move to the ProEdition. It is also the great opportunity to migrate from your “old” tracker to a real affordable ALM software.

The ProEdition package is Do It Yourself oriented : this means that no support is included for installation, configuration, customization or interoperability, but you have the guarantee to have the complete Codendi software operating for your business. Of course, if you need help, you can ask for on-demand services.

Contact us for a risk-free quote :

To remind you, this is our edition comparison :

And let us know about your specific needs! We are always interested in getting feedback.

This week marks the 10^th anniversary of the signing of the Agile Manifesto.

During the intervening decade, agile has gone from a disjoint group of practices taken from extreme programming (XP) to a mainstream approach of software development — if not the mainstream approach. Its success was due to several factors, the most important of which was that in embracing change, agile directly addressed the principal limitation of the waterfall model. In addition, the manifesto’s signatories were all established teachers and trainers and so they were accustomed to reaching large audiences to spread their message. These exponents infected their students with a kind of religious enthusiasm for some techniques  that became the hallmark of agility and the bane of professionals using other approaches. Little by little, however, the core practices that underlay the principles — frequent releases, significant customer involvement, early and frequent testing — became part of how most developers approach their work.

During early part of this first decade, the focus of agile was on developer practices: pair programming, TDD, frequent check-ins, and continuous integration. These practices targeted the individual programmer’s role in the development process.

Then, towards the end of the decade, agile began to evolve to a more encompassing target: the process. Scrum and Kanban emerged as key practices and the qualities of lean manufacturing became the guiding values going forward. Agile now referred to team processes and the way the team interacted with the technology. The most recent step in this direction is surely the migration of continuous integration to continuous deployment,.

This was a natural and necessary evolution. The early programmer-centered practices were good, but not good enough to extend the revolution. Moreover, the practices were being corrupted or insufficiently applied. Among other practices that were unraveling was pair programming, in which two developers work side by side on the same code. Only one has a keyboard. The idea was that two programmers working together in this way would produce more, better quality code and so the cost of two developers working as one would be offset by the results. While there appears to be benefit to pair programming, it’s hard to quantify; and most sites that try it, ultimately give it up.

Process-based agile, however, looks like it’s here to stay. Organizations that try scrum, stay with it. Likewise, lean project management generally results in practices that are sticky; that is, once exposed to how lean works, organizations stick with it. These new directions must be expanded if agile is to break into one arena in which it has gained little traction: large projects  with multiple large teams (more than 500 total developers). Five years from now, I suspect, we’ll know whether agile has breached the last redoubt of the waterfall model successfully.

Extract from Dr Dobbs.com

Hi all,

Last Tuesday, February 1st, we had the Coclico plenary  meeting. The time for everyone on the project to get together and discuss how things are progressing, what should be done next, what is blocking, how to address special issues …

Generally speaking everyone felt the need for establishing more frequent meetings, especially to ascertain and foster technical progress.We decided to have technical meetings, from now on, in between project general meetings. The next one is scheduled to be on March 16th.

Two demos were presented.

ITS representative Olivier Berger showed his tracker importer, which can import trackers (data and metadata) previously exported from FusionForge into FusionForge itself.

Thibault Parmentier and Séverine Rambaud, from Objet Direct, presented a beautiful Scrum Dashboard plugin, which will enrich the Codendi offer on agility.

Things are progressing, and though much work is still to be completed, all stakeholders are preparing the deliverables for the final presentation, which is scheduled for the end of September

That’ all folks !

Yep. That’s right. We already have something to show you whereas the Codendi 4.2 has only been released nearly two months ago. Release early, release often they said

The long time spent in the previous release to make the tracker engine more powerful clearly pays off!

I can’t give details on the roadmap of the future 4.4 version, but one of our goals are to allow a better tracker aggregation. There is a lot of things to say about this subject however we will focus only on small parts, one at the time. Who said “for once”?

Improve the display of linked artifacts

Here is the story. A long time ago, in a Codendi 4.0 far, far away, one could make a dependency between two different artifacts by using a special field named “Dependencies”. We refactored it as a standard field in Codendi 4.2 so that tracker administrators could put permissions or place it as they want on the form. This new field, named ArtifactLink, stores a list of artifact ids and produces links to corresponding artifacts.

This is what we have in Codendi 4.2:

ArtifactLink in Codendi 4.2

This example shows a user story. Four tasks implement the user story. Four bugs are linked to the user story. While the feature is here (we can add and remove dependencies to artifacts), it is far from being satisfying. It is not sexy. It is not meaningful. It suffers from lack of information: Is the bug X closed? What is the progress of the task Y? How many tasks are linked to this user story? A first step toward a better trackers aggregation is to improve the display of the linked artifacts. Wanna see the results?

Sneak peek!

ArtifactLink in 4.4 alpha 1 – Tasks

Niftiest, isn’t it? One tab appears for each tracker, each one uses a report view (the first one for now) to display linked artifacts. It raises some interesting questions: How do we link/unlink artifacts now?  Are we able to create (and link) easily a subtask from a specific UserStory? Can we use another report? Should we display graphs? … Many questions will find an answer in future alpha releases!

You can download the alpha 1, test it by yourself and give us your feedback. The sooner we have your input the better we can match your expectations!

So, what do you think?

Open ESB is a java based open source enterprise service bus. It can be used as a platform for Enterprise Application Integration as well as SOA. It consists of a runtime with sample service engines and binding components. It allows to integrate enterprise applications and web services as loosely coupled composite applications.

The Community feels that since the deal with Sun, Oracle did not show interest in Sun SOA products GlasfishESB and JavaCAPS.  So some people decided to gather and setup a group to keep the Open Enterprise Service Bus community alive and improve the software. The Community gathers several companies as Integrated-apps, Logicoy, Pymma and others but also individual people.

To work in collaboration, The Open ESB Community decided to provide a Codendi platform for their Community members. Now, after many efforts, they are able to set up an infrastructure for source management and builds and provide their first Community OpenESB version.

The Community invites you to exchange with them at the occasion of a the Open ESB Day on the 3 March 2011 in Lille (North France- Polytech Graduate Engineering School of Lille)

Open ESB forge based on Codendi : http://openesb-dev.org/

Subscription to the community day : http://openesblille2011.eventbrite.com/

Polytech Graduate Engineering School of Lille :http://www.polytech-lille.com/english/polytech-lille-ecole-polytechnique-france-art46.html

Open ESB builds : http://www.openesb-dev.org:8080/hudson/view/dev/job/openesb-installers-legacy/

You are member of an other community and would like to provide a Codendi platform for your Community as the Open ESB one, write us and will help you to do so. : info@codendi.com

Inspired from http://geekandpoke.typepad.com

The new release of our open-source ALM platform is available in ProEdition version for our customers and in Community Edition for the Community.

You are all invited to discover the new functionalities : new tracker engine with intuitive administration, workflow…, Git plugin, statistics plugin for administrators, …

To do so, you have several ways:

An overview with the online demo project

You can explore Codendi 4.2 features with our online demo project. This does not require any installation, you just fill in a form and immediately get logins to experience Codendi 4.2 with different views and permissions according to your role : you can play the role of a project manager, of a developer and of a client. The demo project includes simple data that you can modify. 

A 30-day trial : test it out for free with your own project data

If you would like to go into details and make an in-depth evaluation, you can ask a personal account to create your own project on a test server. You will have 30 days in which to enjoy all of the features of Codendi 4.2 with full administrative control. Once you’ve tried out the ALM platform and like it (we think you will), just ask us to migrate your data on a dedicated SaaS server or on an on site-installation.

Sign up to the next live webinar

Want a demo of the new features ? Have technical questions ? Would like to understand the differences between the Community Edition and the Pro Edition ? Sign up to the next live webinar ! In one hour, you will have all the answers to your questions.

Download it for free

If you prefer trying out Codendi 4.2 in your own infrastructure, then download and install the Codendi Community Edition by yourself. Keep in mind that we can not provide support or consulting on this version. You can get help from the Community and documentation at your disposal on Codendi.org

We hope you will enjoy this new version. Don’t hesitate to make comments here.

NB : If you are a customer, either in Saas or in on-site installation, the person in charge of Codendi in your company should have been contacted by our service to plan the migration from 4.0 to 4.2. If you would like more information about it, please get in touch first with him/her or else you can write us.

This year again, Grenoble, the heart of the Alps and city of the Codendi Team, becomes “agile”. Agile experts will meet on Tuesday 23 November 2010 at Alpes Congrès to make us benefit from a new agenda gathering methodologies, feedbacks and use cases. You will be able to learn about general subjects as team management with the session « How to foster a whole-team approach” as well as concrete and specific cases, as the workshop “Doing the Right Software”. This day enables you also to discover other methods you perhaps don’t know yet: Kanban, Lean, Xtreme Programming…

Codendi development team will of course be present to this event. Come to meet us at this occasion, we will discuss about good agile practices over a coffee…

To be sure to get together during the Agile Grenoble, let’s make a date : info@codendi.com

More info on Agile Grenoble

Some weeks ago, we gave a demo of Codendi to Kelly Waters, the Londoner agile blogger who was awarded recently the “Most Valuable Agile Player UK” prize. Kelly is also the web technology Director of IPC Media, the leading UK consumer magazine publisher with 80 magazines.

After the demo, we asked him what he thinks about Codendi and agility. Of course, he said it is not an agile dedicated tool but this is what particularly interested him :

“I liked the fact Codendi is so flexible and that you can do anything you might need to with the trackers. I think for someone with established agile practices, Codendi might help them to keep everything organised in one place.  I think you have combined some powerful features in a very flexible way.[…]”

Kelly confirms here how the open architecture of the trackers and more generally the whole Codendi platform is very customizable to your needs and for instance for your agility practices. Thanks Kelly !