The Codendi Team is happy to announce :

- Codendi’s brand new website : www.codendi.com,

- Codendi’s new version : Codendi 4.8

www.codendi.com :

Codendi’s website will make you discover the enw Codendi offer -Community, Professional and Enterprise- its new features, and at last but NOT least it will allow you to create our own Codendi private space for free !!!

Codendi 4.8

It is the most accomplished version of Codendi ever launched so far.

Codendi reinforces its project management functions thanks to 2 main revolutions :

- Cockpit Manager new component :

It offers a synthetic overview of your key performance indicators (KPI). You can now, thanks to the Cockpit Manager, keep up with your projects budget, workload, remaining work report, business value, real time and historical follow-up, risk management and roadmap follow-up.

- Agile Project templates :

We have developed preconfigured and ready-to-use templates for V-cycle, Kanban and Scrum agile projects. Choose one of them before working on your project and your environment will be setup with the functionalities of the template.

Codendi 4.8  is 100% configurable. You can customize your projects, tracking tools, documents, dashboard, user rights…Codendi enables to define your own workflow and project templates.
Codendi 4.8 enhances its ergonomic and customization options. We have developed a new theme which makes user experience good and efficient, rich text for all fields, and Excel import / export options which enables you to build your requirements, tasks and activities in your Excel documents and to import them into Codendi.

Create a MyCodendi account for free for 39 days and start working… we bet your projects can no longer do without !

Come and discover its:

·  Graphic interfaces improvements,

·  Service Level Agreement (SLA) functionalities extension,

·  Security improvement and updated tools.

Contact our team to have more information at info[at]codendi.com

Or ask questions in our blog or Facebook page:

See you soon !

We target it within the April timeframe.

This release aims to achieve 3 goals :

• improve the security and update the tools (OS, PHP, MySQL, …),
• replace the look and feel with a new “state of the art” design,
• and extend the Service Level Agreement (SLA) functionnality.

Technical

Not to mention great improvements to some pieces of code, the main work in this area consists of upgrading the tools to recent versions. Codendi 4.6 will now use :

•   PHP 5.3
•   CentOS 6.2
•   MySQL 5.1
•   Apache 2.2.15
•   SVN 1.7

Features

SLA management is a feature that most of you were asking for. Codendi 4.6 will include new export functions that increase significantly SLA computation capabilities.

Design

Here is an exemple of what the future interface will look like. As you see, it looks more modern

Of course, you still will be able to customize your own theme.

This acquisition signs years of fruitful relations between Objet Direct and Xerox.

After helping, working with Xerox to Codendi development, Objet Direct decides in 2007 to use it to manage its projects.

In 2009, Objet Direct and Xerox participate together to the project Coclico, that aimed to give significant enhancement to collaborative platforms for software development.

In 2011 with the completion of the project Coclico, Xerox wants to focus in the areas related to its activities in Business Process Outsourcing. Xerox decides to transfer the Codendi activities to a partner, and chooses Objet Direct as the best candidate to continue to develop and promote Codendi all over the world.

More information :

• Press release
• Objet Direct web site

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.

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 may right now download the Community version or request access to an online demo.

If you need a migration from a previous version, you may contact us.

Enjoy !

NEW FEATURES

User can now compute some aggregate functions on numeric and list fields. Those aggregates are displayed in report tables (and therefore in dahsboards and artifact link fields).

Available functions:

• Numeric fields: sum, average, standard deviation, min, max, count, count group by
• List fields : count, count group by

IMPROVEMENTS

• Improve ergonomy on aggregate functions
• Improve artifact link browsing
• Improve reorder the followup comments
• Improve the display of linked artifacts in the field ArtifactLink
• User can now select artifacts to link through a nifty selector window and create “sub-artefact” directly inside the artifact.
• Improve export file in CSV format
• For public project, not authentificated users won’t have acces anymore to any public project.

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.

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

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 !

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?