Codendi

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?