Posted by Damon Young
Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:25:00 GMT
It's no secret: we like Agile Software Development here at ProjectLocker.
We're not dogmatic about any one particular methodology over another. As a company, we've always focused on supporting the most efficient ways software developers can save time, save money, and build better software. But if you look at the Agile Manifesto, I think you'll see some things that we might agree with:
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan"
With that in mind, especially given that supporting Agile teams is the raison d'être for ProjectLocker Lite as well as our long-standing partnership with the Agile & Scrum experts at 3Back, we felt it was time to make it official:
ProjectLocker is now a corporate member of the Agile Alliance.
For all of our current users who are Agile practicioners: I'd encourage you to take a moment and see what resources the alliance can offer to enhance your current project.
And if you're an Agile practicioner or Alliance member who's not using ProjectLocker yet, I think you'll like what you see.
Tags 3Back, agile, alliance, development, hosted, Lite, manifesto, practices, ProjectLocker, scrum, subversion, SVN, trac | no comments
Posted by Damon Young
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:21:00 GMT
We knew there was room in the marketplace for a hosted tools vendor who treated small teams with just as much care and consideration as a big enterprise IT department. But we were all a bit taken aback by the tremendous response we've received for
ProjectLocker Lite. For those of you asking to take part in an official ProjectLocker affiliate program, you may yet get your wish later this summer. In the meantime, we thought we'd try something simple to whet your appetites, so we're having a Referral Raffle.
You can now get entries into our drawing for a brand new
iPhone from Apple simply by telling your friends and fellow developers about ProjectLocker. When your friends sign up from our
website, make sure they enter your email address into the "Referral Source" field at the bottom of the page during checkout. Whoever has the most referrals as of midnight EST August 31, 2008 will be awarded an
iPhone, courtesy of ProjectLocker. So, if you love our service, go spread the word -- you may just strike mobile gold.
Tags apple, cloud, computing, contest, development, hosted, hosting, iPhone, ProjectLocker, raffle, referral, software, subversion | no comments
Posted by Runako Godfrey
Wed, 28 May 2008 06:05:00 GMT
It's not often that software testing is covered by the business press, but the Harvard Business School's newsletter recently ran an article on software testing, with a twist. The case concerns the use of the talents of Autism Spectrum Disorder testers as software testing consultants. This certainly isn't the most widely-applicable case study HBS has ever done. However, the major takeaways -- everyone on your team can be a significant value contributor, and leaders need to be creative in applying the talents of their followers -- can be applied by any team.
The full article is on the HBS site at "The Surprising Right Fit for Software Testing".
no comments
Posted by C. G. Brown
Fri, 02 May 2008 12:32:00 GMT
Did you know you can use a ProjectLocker hosted Subversion repository for WebDAV storage as well? To do this, simply put the URL of your Subversion repository into your preferred WebDAV client. Each time you copy or update a file in the repository, it increments the version number, so you can use both WebDAV and standard Subversion access on the same repository. However, since you can have unlimited projects with ProjectLocker, you can create one project to store files and another to store code that you'd manage in a more typical way.
Each operating system and version accesses WebDAV differently, so we recommend that you read the documentation or check Google for your particular operating system to determine the best client or tools. ProjectLocker customers can file tickets with ProjectLocker Support if they're having any issues getting their WebDAV to work.
Tags subversion, tips, webdav | 1 comment
Posted by C. G. Brown
Sat, 26 Apr 2008 16:12:00 GMT
We've made several additions to ProjectLocker Lite Trac recently to improve your experience. Here are some of the new features:
Plugins
We've installed the following plugins:
If there are other plugins that you think you and other customers may find useful, file a ticket with us and we'll install them, pending a security review and making sure they don't cause any issues. You can activate plugins that we have installed by going to the Admin menu in Trac itself.
Improved Subversion-Trac Interaction
We've installed the trac-contrib commit hook that allows you to cause action to occur on Trac tickets. If you use the right syntax, you can make commit messages leave comments on Trac tickets or even mark tickets as fixed just by doing a Subversion commit. The syntax is described in detail in the Support FAQ.
Trac Upgrade via Web
Installation of some plugins requires an upgrade of your Trac environment. After some customer feedback, we have added a link to run trac-admin upgrade from ProjectLocker Portal, so after installing the Tags or Discussions plugin, if your Trac instance indicates that it needs an upgrade, go to your Trac Service Properties for your project and click "Run trac-admin Upgrade". Your instance will upgrade itself on the spot and you can proceed with your work.
As always, we welcome your feedback on how we can make our service more useful for you.
Tags plugins, subversion, trac, upgrade | 3 comments
Posted by Damon Young
Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:37:00 GMT
We love feedback.
So much so, we even have an e-mail address soley dedicated to receiving the thoughts of our clients, called, unsurprisingly, feedback@projectlocker.com.
At this moment in particular, we would love to hear from all of our current clients with your thoughts on our hosted Subversion service. What do you love? What do you love less? What would you like to see changed?
Send us an e-mail. Let us know what you think.
Tags clients, control, current, hosted, SCM, source, subversion, SVN, version | 4 comments
Posted by Damon Young
Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:08:00 GMT
While we're very big proponents of Subversion here at ProjectLocker, we also recognize that even the best tools and, consequently, the teams that use them can be crippled by the wrong development processes. With that in mind, here is an excellent article by Henrik Kniberg, a Certified Scrum Master with Crisp, a Stockholm-based Agile consulting firm. In it, he proposes a methodology to most effectively make use of your version control tool when applying Agile best practices in an environment with multiple & distinct teams working from common code base. Notice that he never mentions a specific version control tool, just a set of procedures and team protocols to help optimize the process. More details at the link below:
"Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams"
Watch this blog for more posts in the future on best practices and other development resources we think will help you build better software.
Tags agile, best, development, hosted, lifecycle, practices, scrum, software, subversion, SVN | no comments
Posted by C. G. Brown
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:11:00 GMT
We are happy to announce that ProjectLocker is now integrated with FogBugz issue tracking system. If you are currently a FogBugz customer, just go to Integration Settings in ProjectLocker, set the FogBugz settings based on the values in the Perl script they generate for you, and you're all set. ProjectLocker will notify FogBugz every time there is a commit message containing "BugzID: [bug ID #]" on a single line. Your commits show up as Checkins in FogBugz, and if you like, you can configure your site settings to point back to ProjectLocker's source browser.
We have also installed Hudora's Trac-FogBugz plugin for Trac, to provide a convenient link back to FogBugz. Just ask us and we can get you configured with that at no additional charge.
We are big fans of Trac here, but we understand that some customers need different features for issue management, have already chosen other tools, or just prefer other tools. We want to help our customers work in the way that's best for them. Keep telling us what products you are happiest with and that you'd like to use in conjunction with ProjectLocker's best in class Subversion hosting and Trac hosting. We're listening.
Tags commits, fogbugz, issue, subversion, tracking | 1 comment
Posted by C. G. Brown
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:08:00 GMT
We've just released an integration between ProjectLocker and Basecamp for those users who use Basecamp for project collaboration and have enabled the Basecamp API in their Basecamp account. ProjectLocker Subversion hosting users will be able to:
- Send commit messages from Subversion to Basecamp as Basecamp messages.
- Create new ProjectLocker projects from existing Basecamp project.
- Associate users in ProjectLocker with users in Basecamp, so that messages actually come from the committing user where possible.
If there are more ways that we can make communication between ProjectLocker and Basecamp more useful to you, please let us know. We are excited about our growing list of integrations and are always looking for more ways to make our services useful to you and the way you work. Of course, if you have any issues using the integration, don't hesitate to file a ticket, and our team will promptly resolve your problems.
Tags basecamp, commits, integrations, subversion | 4 comments
Posted by Damon Young
Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:45:00 GMT
A recent entry at O'Reilly's OnLamp blog, entitled "Subversion for BSD With All the Bells and Whistles" described the time and effort that an experienced system administrator like Jeff Palmer had to take to install and configure a local instance of Subversion from scratch. In speaking with Jeff, he told me that it took up 2 days to make that first install, although now, he's probably cut the process down to 1.5 to 2 hours. In addition, he spends roughly an hour a week on maintanence.
A time savings, to be sure. But, a developer team could have access to a comparable instance of Subversion literally within moments of signing up from our website.
In addition to near instantaneous provisioning for most clients, ProjectLocker's user interfaces simplify the process of team and user management to such a degree that, for many of our clients, those tasks can be assigned to non-technical managers, freeing your more technical team members to concentrate on your most stubborn technical challenges.
It also doesn't take into account the time & materials required to both implement and maintain a backup & recovery strategy comparable to the one provided by ProjectLocker for all of our services.
Or the time saved on your development efforts by the speed of a ProjectLocker restore should such a disaster occur.
Or the flexibility of downloading backups on demand.
Or the convenience of receiving commit notifications in either Twitter or Jabber.
Or ProjectLocker's proprietary Subversion enhancements, like our Analytics tool.
In short, the time and expense your system administrators can save every day by choosing ProjectLocker is just the tip of our software quality iceberg.
Just something to consider.
Tags control, hosting, LAMP, O, Reilly, SCM, source, subversion, SVN, version | no comments
