ProjectLocker Blog: Tag trac

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.

New ProjectLocker Lite Trac Features

C. G. Brown — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:12:00 -0500

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:

XML-RPC (http://www.trac-hacks.org/wiki/XmlRpcPlugin)
Tags (http://www.trac-hacks.org/wiki/TagsPlugin)
Discussions (http://www.trac-hacks.org/wiki/DiscussionPlugin)

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.

Downloadable Backups are Here!

C. G. Brown — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:57:00 -0600

While we take every precaution to make sure customer data is backed up and protected, our ProjectLocker Lite customers have been clamoring for the ability to download Subversion backups and Trac backups, similar to the Archival service for ProjectLocker Enterprise. The ability to take on-demand backups is now here. For just $2.50 per project per backup, you can create a backup accessible in ProjectLocker Portal and downloadable for 30 days. You can access this via the Backups section in ProjectLocker Portal, visible to all account administrators.

We are open to suggestions for features and improvements to this service. We're trying to provide as many services and features as we can while keeping the prices low, but we'd love to hear your thoughts.