*Project/Code Management Software* We've been running a SVN pull of Trac 0.11 for quite some time now, ever since the week after the planned launch date for 0.11. One of our biggest problems after starting to rely on it for all of our development time-lines and bugs is that tickets were "getting lost", since we use the multiple project (pretty much a must have for SVN). As a result in a busy day it's hard to keep "trac" of small tickets coming in from our project manager. They would sometimes go missing for a week (BAD)... Which essentially defeated the whole point of trac in the first place, to eliminate the guess work and reduce the communicate needed.
*Trac Customizations ( Multiple project overview ) * So I customized the splash screen to give us an overview of where the project stood, how many tickets were opened/closed and if there were any critical tickets at all. You can take a look at the interface at you just won't be able to look at the projects. If you guys like this let me know and I'll submit a patch for a suggested feature, I just added some code to the function that does the overview page (finally got my $$$ from that python course in college). http://empirestaging.com:8500/ *Project / Trac Workflow* But just having trac installed doesn't really tell the story of how we use it. We use SVN for source control. But the business rules were for us the hardest to work out. So here is what I came-up with for our group: *Project Setup * * a new project comes along, ant scripts fired to create skeleton code, create SVN, create Trac, create IIS, and check-in initial code * all the requirement documents, mock-ups etc are added to the base wiki page in Trac * initial project setup milestones in week intervals, fill those milestones with tickets for the week * all tasks are placed into small tickets usually 4-8 hours a piece. (read: XP user stories), small for us because we do web-projects * each milestone has an estimate finish date (the day after the actual due date because that's how trac works) * milestones are labeled with the week of completion * * each ticket's hour estimate is placed in the title (this is our weakest link by far)* * developers pull a local copy to their development machine, run ANT scripts to setup IIS locally *Project Workflow* * any tickets that don't get finish in that milestones are reviewed and and reshuffle the rest of the tickets * Timeline is generated base on the tickets accordingly. This review happen every monday morning * every svn check in should be tied to a ticket, so we use the fixes, refs svn hooks to monitor this * there is a pre-commit hook that ensures it's at least has a comment * 'updated the login script. fixes #214' would be a sample commit comment * http://trac.edgewall.org/browser/trunk/contrib/svn-trac-hook?rev=294 * bugs are filed in a maintenance milestone and each milestone is tested on the following Monday and any related bugs are addressed from the previous milestone on monday/tuesday * all maintenance for the company overall (past projects, small upgrades) are managed in our company milestones * Use cruisecontrol.net SVN plug-in to poll every minute to see if there was a svn commit. it then checks out the latest code, * runs init=true scripts, etc to refresh the code base... (still missing automated reactor cleanup) * also missing is the automated unit/functional selenium test auto-run * http://ccnet.thoughtworks.com/ * Any issues or install scripts that need to be done are noted in the 'project release notes' section in the project wiki Our project manager then uses the timelines in trac and estimates to layout a chart of the projects that are currently in development and that are coming up. *Trac Review* After using it for several months (although I don't have custom workflows, my three biggest downfalls were. 1*. estimate VS. actual reporting. There are several plug-ins available that I'm still evaluating, but the biggest problem for us so far was estimating xx hours and taking xx hours. If I could get mylyn and the plug-in to work together, we would be golden. 2. multiple project overview (which I patched in a view for that) 3. Re-shuffling tickets is a PAIN. If you quickly want to re-evaluate, re-assign or shift around tickets you have to open them up, click around, re-assign go back to query... if there was a quick view or drag-drop this would save us a lot of time. *This is our biggest 'complaint' or issue so far. Since we just have to take a look back every week (about 10+ minutes a week is lost determining this). *Project/Programmer Velocity *I read this quite some time ago in the extreme programmer series but never took it to heart... you should! Basically determine how many productive hours you get from you or your developers each week. If you don't know take what you think you do and divide it by three (in the book). Because you'll have a million other things come up. Then plan your milestones accordingly. review at the end of each one, and readjust your tickets (or stories) accordingly. *Hour / Billing Tracking *We separately use Harvest for our billing/tracking of hours to our clients. This has been a truely amazing service, and with desktop widgets it couldn't get any easier. It does all the estimated budget vs. actual that we couldn't get out of Trac. check these guys out http://www.getharvest.com/ *MyLyn* I use mylyn personally but haven't written it up for my co-workers. Unfortunately I haven't found a way for it to work with the multi-project without disabling multiple logins with Trac/SVN. If you know of a way in trac 0.11 PLEASE let me know, this would be great to get all my co-workers on board with this... Either way, it's still a great idea and very effective. *Other Suggestions / Options** *We used IBM Rational series for a test drive for a while. If you're a large shop that can handle the $$$ this is by far my favorite tool. I used others at Intel before, but this was great. The price was WAY out of our price range however. I will look at the other tools and see if we can't benefit from those. *Feedback *Please let me know any feedback you might have on the process I mentioned above. If you see it and like it or hate it let me know because I haven't gotten a real chance to explain it in depth to the community at large. * * Thanks, Roy ** On Dec 21, 2007 11:43 AM, Stephen Moretti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On 06/12/2007, Peter Bell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > I'm using Trac right now for some projects. It is NOT the tool for > > reporting or higher level overviews and is limited even for bug tracking by > > things like the inability to have a "review" workflow for QA. I know it is > > widely used, I love the svn and mylyn integration, and as a solo dev or > > small team on simple projects it is good, but I don't think of it as a > > complete project management solution. It's a barebones bug tracker that gets > > out of your way while allowing you to keep track of what you're doing. I > > like it, but I think more is often required. > > > > > Peter, > > > Take a look at Custom workflows in Trac 0.11. > I started writing a couple of blog entries on custom workflows in Trac > 0.11 - unfortunately I only got as far as the first one which covers > getting started with making your own workflows and testing them (I know > slightly bizarre writing the start and end with no middle, but it'll become > clear when you look at the article) > > The custom workflows allow you to make a workflow in trac that mets your > specific needs. In my last job (I started a new position on Monday this > week) I set up a work flow that allowed us to defer tickets as well as put > them through a QA phase. The examples that come with 0.11 includes a open > source workflow and an "enterprise" workflow, both of which include QA > phases if I remember correctly. The only problem I've found is that mylyn > doesn't quite support custom workflows yet. > > The reporting in Trac 0.11 is much better as well. Although I don't know > what your specific requirements for reporting are, so it could be it still > isn't sufficient. > > I'm currently also playing with a stack of plugins that add to the user > management, ticket tracking and management and wiki management. At some > point I'll have to blog about that as well. > > Incidentally, Trac 0.11 was released as beta 1 last week. > > -- > Stephen Moretti > Blog : http://nil.checksite.co.uk/ > Twitter : http://twitter.com/mr_nil > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CFCDev" group. 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