ProjectLocker Blog: Tag SVN

Agile developers deliver faster when ProjectLocker teams with Rally Software

Damon Young — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:05:00 -0500

As I said before: We like Agile.

So, it only makes sense for ProjectLocker to lend a helping hand to the biggest Agile project management platform in the world. As we announced just last week, ProjectLocker has now entered into a strategic partnership with Rally Software, and we're just added the first of what we expect to be a series of technical integrations between our two products.

Starting today, all ProjectLocker Lite and Enterprise customers can configure their Subversion commit notifications to update tickets in Rally while also providing a link back to the commit itself within Rally. Now, teams who use Rally to manage their Agile projects can empower all of their team members (developers, testers, project managers, etc.) to look directly into the code in question on a given ticket or issue. Conversely, ProjectLocker customers who choose to use Rally can now add their powerful Agile management hub to their suite of tools, bringing all of the other stakeholding constituencies into the development process while still supporting many of their preferred applications. By giving both developers and testers easier direct access to the relevant source data, bugs and problems can be identified and resolved much more rapidly, increasing your time to market.

If you're a Rally customer interested in using ProjectLocker, or a ProjectLocker customer interested in Rally, contact us at sales@projectlocker.com, and we can help you get started with whichever half of the partnership you need. If you're currently using both ProjectLocker and Rally, contact our technical support staff, and they can walk you through the integration process.

In the meantime, watch this space for future integration announcements.

ProjectLocker joins the Agile Alliance

Damon Young — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:25:00 -0500

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.

What's on your mind about Subversion?

Damon Young — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:37:00 -0500

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.

Source control best practices for teams with multiple projects

Damon Young — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:08:00 -0500

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.

Setting up Subversion in moments instead of days

Damon Young — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:45:00 -0500

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.