Moved to GitHub

OK, it's official. I've just moved the project's repository over to GitHub. You can now find it at http://github.com/explainpmt/explainpmt. If you're not familiar with git, the guides on GitHub are probably a good place to start.

Should eXPlainPMT's SCM Move to GitHub?

We are considering moving the SCM for eXPlainPMT from Subversion hosted by Google to git hosted on GitHub (http://github.com). This would make it easier for people to contribute to the project without having to become full members of the core team, and it would also enable people to easily track official changes in forked repositories with their own, private changes.

Please fill out this short survey and let us know what you think.

Getting goin again

So, I have been slacking the past few months and have not had the time/energy/drive to work on eXPlainPMT. Paying projects always seem to win :)

Anywho, thanks to Andy Trommer and Josh Taylor, I have gotten excited again about working on the tool. Andy and Josh are two new development members to the project and each bring passion, a little know how, and a willingness to learn. My hope is that we can break some stuff, make some items better, and generally learn something working together. In the end...you never know....we might even get a better product out of effort.

Oi! with the Moving of the Stuff

Hopefully for the last time, there's a lot of reorganization going on with the infrastructure for this project. I've always been hosting most of the project on a dedicated server that I leased, but I'm planning to get rid of the server, so I needed to find a new place to host the subversion repository and project blog. Also, we've decided to use third-party, hosted applications where possible in order to reduce the maintenance overhead of the project.

To that end, I've moved the project over to Google Code and the weblog is now hosted here on Blogger. This means the subversion repository is now located at http://explainpmt.googlecode.com/svn.

We decided to host the project on Google Code instead of Rubyforge (where we've been making release packages available) for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason is that Rubyforge only seems to allow commit access to the repository via svn+ssh—this caused problems with some developers who were behind corporate firewalls. The second reason is that it doesn't seem right to consider eXPlainPMT a "Ruby" project. Sure, it's written using Ruby on Rails; but its utility is much more general. It's our hope that moving the project to Google Code will signify that we have ambitions higher than just being an interesting Rails project—we want eXPlainPMT to be an interesting project because of its utility.

What - A Designer You Say

Originally posted on old blog by Jake Dempsey

I have been slacking…

I have not been able to do any feature development lately, but I have been trying to recruit various folks to offer feedback. I think the one thing that has been lacking since eXPlainPMT’s inception has been its overall look and feel. It just does not have a polished enough feel. Well, hopefully, that is about to change. Luckily, I have gotten a designer (Jen Wendling) interested in helping out with the project. Check out the demo site at http://demo.explainpmt.com to see the new login page. I am hoping to get the whole application converted to have this vibe to it. I will also be working to add some usability items that have been bothering me….yep that means that pop-ups will hopefully be gone. Yes 1999, you may have them back!!

Happy Testing
Jake Dempsey

eXPlainPMT-20070423.0 Released

Originally posted on old blog by Jake Dempsey

I just released a new version of eXPlainPMT on RubyForge.

I think this is the list of changes….to be honest, it has been a whirlwind getting all the features migrated. At the same time, I started playing around with some new ideas like RSS support.

Features/Bug Fixes:

• Export of Stories from an iteration into Excel.
  
• Creation of Tasks for a given story.
  
• Ability to assign ownership to a Task.
  
• Export of Tasks from an iteration into Excel.
  
• Ability to create Acceptance Tests for a given story.
  
• Ability to create Acceptance Tests for later assignment or use as System Acceptance.
  
• Ability to export Acceptance Tests into Excel.
  
• Added name to iteration’s details.
  
• Changed backlog “Move Stories To” display to use iteration name instead of date.
  
• Changed iteration “Move Stories To” display to use iteration name instead of date.
  
• Migraton to new table format and sorting mechanism. Sorts will be saved between uses of the tool.
  
• Export of Stories from the backlog into Excel.
  
• Ability to clone Story.
  
• Ablitty to clone Acceptance Test.
  
• Task and Story view from Dashboard.
  
• Convert links to actionable dropdowns similar to Gmail.
  
• Refactoring of existing tables to new format and sorting mechanism.
  
• Add backlog links and story move functionality to bottom of backlog.
  
• Allow users to create projects
  
• Security model update to allow team members to add other team members to a project.
  
• Project initiatives which allow for logical grouping of stories.
  
• Add ability to manage backlog as numerically sorted list.
  
• Burndown chart and project statistics.
  
• Convert user pages to popups
  
• Move up move down breaks on iteration view
  
• Add iteration to story table
  
• Refactoring for performance improvements.
  
• Add show all stories to backlog
  
• Add customer to story and story table
  
• Add team to users
  
• Releases (Currently just metadata)
  
• Remove subprojects
  
• Basic User Guide updated.
  
• RSS support for Story Audit.
  

Happy Testing!

Jake Dempsey

Merge is Complete!

Originally posted on old blog by Jake Dempsey

Well, I have completed the merge of the forked version into trunk. I also made some small enhancements along the way and fixed some small bugs as well. One of the new features adds the ability to watch a project via a RSS feed. The feed will tell you when something is modified on a created story. I will probably add more to this feature such as when a story is created or deleted.

I still need to develop a small doc on the new features and bug fixes. Once I get this done, I will prepare a new release to put on RubyForge. You can also take a look at running install of the current build at: http://64.79.219.117. You can login with demo/demo.

Happy Testing!

Jake Dempsey
www.watij.com