AgileTrack / News: Recent posts

A fair amount more of the record access restrictions have been implemented in this release. Although roles were available previously, much of the record field access had not been implemented. This release should take care of most of that, but the UI has not been thoroughly tested with unprivileged roles so there may be some unexpected problems.

Iteration statistics have been fixed also. Daily iteration stats are now tracked so that they can be presented in reports in the future. Along with that, user iteration summary information is now being generated. During an iteration, a user's total workload and progress can be viewed in the Home summary tab.... read more

This update focuses on fixing minor interface issues, and problems with MySQL 5.0 databases. MySQL 5.0 databases are believed to be supported correctly now. The interface updates include the following:

* Record updates automatically detected across clients are propagated to the UI allowing template, project, iteration, release, and user lists to automatically refresh when changes occur.
* Sorting in tree tables is fixed and sort order has been made consistent (some columns had been sorting in a non-intuitive order in some places.)
* Added a "Current Iteration" selection in the main task list that flattens the issue tree and includes stories, tasks, defects, and sub-tasks.
* Selecting a project from the main issue list will include issues of sub-projects in the results.
* Creating new issues wasn't saving the selected user and wasn't allowing any states other than "Prepare" to be selected.... read more

Version 0.6 is here and for the most part, has all of the planned improvements:

* Interface has some general improvements. Most record views now allow comments and history of records to be viewed.
* Sub-task life-cycle has been expanded. Subtasks can be assigned to users and have descriptions and comments.
* Issue tree tables are available for drill-down based on project tree, iterations, etc.
* Project record now have state, priority, time-estimate, and parent project fields. Projects can be related in a tree structure for better hierarchical relationship. Projects can now be categorized as Product, Component, or Project records.
* Release records are available with name, description, and associated project. Iterations can be associated with releases.
* Defect records have severity and frequency fields for better categorization and sorting of defects.
* User role assignment is available, but security logic is not fully implemented.... read more

A fair amount of progress has been made on AgileTrack Version 0.6 in the last month. Some of the images on the Screenshots page have been updated with captures of views that are under development.

As far as actual functionality goes, much of the planned changes have been made. A number of minor details still need to be smoothed out at this point and I expect that to take another week or two. I hope to have things worked out to the point of posting the first 0.6 release on March 6th, though if I am unable to find enough time, I may have to put it off by a week.

Thanks to the feedback I've received from some early users, I think the 0.5 releases have been cleaned up enough and are adequately stable at this point that it's now time to pursue some new features. I'm mostly wanting to improve the way projects, stories, and tasks relate and can be managed.

The sub-task interface is pretty clunky and obscure. It needs to be reworked. I'd still like sub-tasks to directly tied to parent stories/tasks/defects, but the life of a sub-tasks should be more visible and assignable. I intend to split sub-tasks into sub-tasks and acceptance test cases. For the most part they only need the same data as currently is being stored, but they also need to be assignable to different users. They need to be displayable in the main issue list, and be easy to create and use. I've thought of doing away with sub-tasks and allowing top-level issues to be assigned as children of other issues, but I think that would complicate things more than improve things. Instead, I expect to provide a full sub-task record view, and also expand the issue table to allow sub-tasks to be viewed by providing tree handles on stories in the issue list.... read more

This release is primarily intended to improve the Linux distribution of the tool. The minimal distribution now includes both Windows and Linux JDIC libraries, and should be usable with local installations of Java. For Linux, the install scripts should take care of determining the Java installation location. For Windows, the agiletrack.exe should also discover the local Java installation. Linux initial Window position should be working correctly now, and toggling the window frame should be functioning better.... read more

An update has been create to fix some problems discovered in the initial release--specifically, a serious problem preventing the application window from ever appearing, and a couple minor issues. In addition, some preloading and cache persistence has been added to the client to improve initialization speed and general performance.

The server has been also had a couple small problems fixed, and now has a GUI configuration interface. The Linux version is functional and will soon be released with this update.... read more

Happy New Year! As promised, a first release of AgileTrack has been made before the end of the year. The release did not have all of the features hoped for. The most notable missing feature is role based access restrictions. Server installation and configuration documentation has not been completed and the Linux server release also hasn't been completed. However, the Windows minimal release code but manually tweaked to run on Linux without much trouble. Also incomplete is usage documentation, but much of the tool should be fairly self explanatory.... read more

As AgileTrack is nearly ready for an initial release, an online demonstration application has been created. The demonstration uses Java Web Start to launch the application, and provides default configuration to access a local demonstration server for data.

The intent is to make evaluation and preview of the tool as easy as possible. To use the demo, go to http://agiletrack.org/demo.html and follow the instructions. If there are any problems or questions, please let me know.

The past couple months have been fairly productive. The XML-RPC interface has been implemented as the primary communication protocol for the Agile Track Server. The interface has not changed much in all this time. It needs to be revised to improve some performance issues, but it is basically complete. The main piece that is now being completed is the security framework for the system.

I think that providing an easy install and setup procedure is important before providing any sort of release, and the installers are in progress at this point are progressing well. Windows installers for the client and server packages have been created and are both essentially complete. The Windows installation provides the option of being registered the server as a service or not. I'm not sure what an ideal install solution for Linux would be, and at this point I'm planning on simple .tar.gz distributions for the client and server that include a little setup script to complete the installation--probably adding an agiletrack-server script in /etc/init.d and add agiletrack to /usr/bin. So, the installation process is coming along very well and is nearly complete.... read more

Agile Track was started because it seemed that no tool existed that provided an unobtrusive interface for task tracking for software developers. Many tools of this type are web-based and have what I would consider a clunky/burdensome interface. I would classify many such tools as project management tools, rather that software development tools. Agile Track is intended to contribute to software development in a way that does not distract programmers by putting them in a mode of project management. It is also designed to be compatible with agile development methodologies, such as Extreme Programming.... read more