Planet Forge

It took us a while, but we’ll be participating at Plänet Forge soon as well. We, that is the Evolvis team at tarent GmbH:

• Thorsten Glaser (that’s me), a sysadmin at tarent and an Evolvis developer
• Sven Frommeyer, an apprentice sysadmin at tarent
• Stefan Walenda, our project manager
• … and potentially others

To clean up the nomenclature…

• Evolvis is the platform consisting of EvolvisForge and others, such as a Continuum or Hudson build server, an Alfresco DMS, a MediaWiki, …
• EvolvisForge shall be the name of the customised installation (not fork) of FusionForge (formerly gforge-*.deb) that is used by Evolvis
• evolvis.org is the public platform where tarent GmbH is presenting their open-sourced projects
• There are other Evolvis installations at *.tarent.de domains, which are private.

EvolvisForge customisations mostly consist of: take a stable FusionForge version plus bugfixes, sometimes backports (such as the FF 5.0 MediaWiki integration), change some defaults, and add Evolvis branding such as our theme. Also, some integration with the other Evolvis components, Univention/LDAP, etc.

This is a welcoming posting, so I better keep it short. We’ve been in Issy-les-Moulineaux (I hope I spelt that correctly) breaking up the French cabal, but they’re all nice people. Let’s try and improve all the forges!

Le livrable de la tâche 2 du WP5 est disponible sur le site du projet Coclico/Onglet Fichiers. Ce livrable comprend une archive Eclispe Ganymede Plugin RCP + Mylyn + code source du Plugin Codendi. A noter qu'il y a une version plus récente d'Eclipse qui est sortie : Galileo, mais nous ne l'avons pas utilisé parce que la version du plugin Codendi n'est pas encore dispo pour Galileo. Si vous avez des remarques n'hésitez pas.

Codendi propose cette année une nouvelle offre de service, Codendi SaaS*.

Pour gérer et suivre ses projets sur la plateforme Codendi sans se soucier des aspects d’installation, de maintenance ou de fiabilité de la solution, ni de la sécurisation du réseau, Codendi propose à ses clients de disposer d’une plateforme Codendi installée sur un serveur externe.

Codendi SaaS est en effet hébergé sur un serveur de Xerox, et dispose au quotidien d’une équipe expérimentée au service de l’application, basée sur une infrastructure robuste et sécurisée.

Le support est assuré par nos équipes de développement et support, dans le but de faciliter aux acteurs des projets l’utilisation de la solution, quelque soit son lieu de connexion.

Codendi SaaS est rapidement opérationnel, s’adapte au volume d’activité, et permet une interopérabilité des membres du projet, qu’ils appartiennent à la même entreprise, qu’ils soient clients-fournisseurs ou même partenaires.

SupInfo installe cette année Codendi SaaS dans le cadre des projets d’entreprise que leurs étudiants doivent réaliser; Ce service leur permet de partager les projets développés avec les entreprises concernées et de toujours bénéficier de la dernière mise à jour et de la dernière version de Codendi.

* SaaS ou “Service as a Software”, est un service qui propose l’hébergement d’une solution à distance, au sein d’une infrastructure externe à celle de l’utilisateur.

Codendi offers a new service, Codendi SaaS*.

In order to manage and follow the projects on the Codendi platform without having to manage the installation, maintenance or reliability aspects, or the environment security, Codendi allows its customers to benefit from a Codendi platform based on an external server.

Indeed, Codendi SaaS is hosted by Xerox, and is managed by an experimented team in charge of the application, leaning on a robust and secured infrastructure.

The support is carried out by our development and support teams, in order to facilitate the use of the solution to the Codendi SaaS members, wherever they are connecting to.

Codendi SaaS is quickly useful, allows a good scalability and interoperability between the actors of the project. Those actors can work in the same company, or can be customers, providers or partners.

SupInfo has selected this year Codendi Saas to help its students to achieve the internship projects they have to realize. This service allows them to share the project with the concerned companies, and to benefit from the latest releases and versions of Codendi.

SaaS, for “Software as a service”, is a service which consists in hosting an application on its own server for its customer use.

This is getting old news, and others have blogged about them before I did, but here's my summary of the recent activity in and around FusionForge.

The early February meeting was a success, and gathered about twenty people on the first day and a dozen or so on the second day (not planned initially). My impression is that there was a healthy mix of FusionForge hackers, FusionForge users, and people from other forge communities (Codendi, NovaForge, and even one representative from nFORGE, from South Korea). I'm not going to repeat all that was said then, especially since the proceedings are online. Beyond the technical points, I'll just advertise PlanetForge again, since everyone present agreed we had lots to share and that this site would be a good and relatively neutral place. If you're into forges, I recommend joining us in that community.

On the purely FusionForge front, news are good too. Most of the major pieces we want to see in the next release (which is probably going to be called 5.0) are in place. The last blocker we had was the merge of the rework of the default theme for better accessibility and easier maintenance and customisability (most of the theming now happens in CSS). This merge has been completed this week, and although there are still a few rough edges, it's mostly done. We'll try to fix most of these rough edges soonish, then start a stabilisation branch towards 5.0, so more experimental work can start again on trunk. For the impatient and the curious, there's a list of new features on the fusionforge.org homepage, and the site is now running code from trunk.

Of course, we're eager to get testers for that, which is why I prepared snapshot packages. They are currently stuck in NEW on their way to the official Debian experimental repository due to the renaming of the source package and the introduction of plenty of new binary packages, but they can already be obtained from my unofficial repository at people.debian.org. The packages are built for Debian unstable, but they seem to run just fine on Lenny if you grab mediawiki from backports.org (only required for the Mediawiki plugin, of course), and libnusoap-php and php-htmlpurifier from Debian testing (they don't drag any extra dependencies).

I'll end this note by reminding people of the announcement I did three months ago: as of this week, Debian Etch is no longer officially supported security-wise, and so neither is GForge 4.5. As far as I know, I was the last person doing that, and my incentives have gone away on the day Etch ceased to be supported, since it was also the day the Adullact forge finally migrated from Etch with GForge 4.5 to Lenny with FusionForge 4.8. If you're still using 4.5, well… I think you should be aware of that.

That more or less wraps it up for now. The next announcement is likely to be about a release candidate…

The project of the month is an interesting project using the CodingTeam software forge. Each month, I'll pick up another project that looks attractive and speak about it on this blog. Thus, the community gets a place to be known. So if you use CodingTeam (either CodingTeam.net or your own forge) your project can appear here! By the way, if you think that it would be captivating to present your project here, let me know!

The project of the month for february 2010 is Bechamail. And it becomes the first project of the month!

Bechamail is lead by Robert Sebille on CodingTeam.net since november 2007! He works on this project since 2005 for his association with help and feedbacks from the other members of it.

Bechamail is a French-speaking project written in PHP. It's an e-mail addresses manager. Concretely, it helps the sysadmin by providing an user oriented tool to easily configure e-mail addresses for one or more domain names. It fits to MTA and MDA configuration.

This project has been developed in an associative context as Robert is one of the fouding members of Cassiopea. The goal of this association is to heavily connect associative virtual networks and to help people to understand new technologies. Cassiopea provides internet services such as implementation or development of websites, mailing lists, domain names, e-mail addresses, trainings… to other Belgian associations.

Bechamail is born in 2005 because, at the start of this associative project, whenever it was necessary to create, modify or delete an alias or an e-mail box, they had to intervene on the server. It was inevitable to automate the process and allow members to manage their e-mails easily.

Bechamail is successfully used at Cassiopea and also at Banlieues, an association that focuses on the disadvantaged public. Those who want to try Bechamail can test the demo!

And now, a few questions asked to the project leader!

• How did you know CodingTeam?
  
  By searching the web for forges lists (but I don't remember where). Functionnalities suited me and it was in French and English. It looked good to me to support a sofware forge available in French. There were not many.
   
• What CodingTeam brings in your project development?
  
  Usual functionnalities of a software forge of course, like the essential SVN. Once you start to use CodingTeam, it's so practical, how to do without? ;). I remember a day, there was once a technical issue on the the server side, I really appreciated to be able to discuss it on the chatroom and the CodingTeam reactivity!
   
• What would you see in CodingTeam in the future?
  
  I was going to say the dashboard, but it's already done ;), great! Then, e-mail report when someone answers to a bug or a feature request. Otherwise, I have to think regularly to consult the bug tracker or the RSS feed, and I don't always think about it, especially if I am busy with another project for a few months. That's why e-mail notifications would be useful for me, because I could see them even if I'm working elsewhere. I read the discussion here. The solution to choose to receive or not notifications seems good to me.
   
• Since you use CodingTeam, did you became rich and sexy?
  
  Rich with money? Not so. On the other side, I found a lot of fortunes on CodingTeam.net ;). Sexy? I was already sexy before, in my point of view. ;)
   

Thanks to Robert who answered to my questions! Feel free to take a look at Bechamail!

You work on developing a software forge, you’re an admin for a software forge, or a project administrator.

Join us and discuss (in english) forge matters on discussions@planetforge.org, to try and improve communication, sharing, reuse and interoperability among various hosting platforms, and collaborative development tools.

You may prefer joining the PlanetForge RSS aggregator if you blog about forges (feel free to add it to your preferred RSS reader).

As part of COCLICO, we’re working on an exchange format for forges, that should help dump, restore, export and import from different software forges.

There are various use cases for this, like moving a project from one forge to another, but also as backup/restore feature for forge admins. More about the rationale here.

We’d like this format to be a standard some day, so it should have good properties so that it’s generic enough and at the same time easy to adopt. Thus it would be relatively easy to contribute new exporters or importers to an framework (for which we’ll implement basic core tools), while having a long-lasting format that can still be used in the future.

A lot of work ahead of us, and this is just a short notice in case you’re interested and you’d like to know more

Stay tuned, and if interested, join discussions@planetforge.org to discuss this topic.

P.S.: yes, it’s a rebirth of CoopX, somehow (see the coopx tag in my blog for more details)

The INRIA (the French national institute for research in computer science and control) in Grenoble has animated on 12th January a seminar about the methodologies and experiences of the open source based developments.

This meeting, organized by the business intelligence Club IN Tech and GRILOG association (“Grenoble Isère Logiciel”, i.e. Grenoble Isère Software), was the occasion for the different actors, industrialists and researchers, to have a technological and information exchange.

During this conference, a demonstration session has allowed to present open source applications and products, and to discuss the development team organization, the features used, or the technology transfer among others.

Nicolas Guérin, our technical manager, has presented Codendi and its evolution : from the forge created inside the Xerox research center in order to gather all the required tools of the software development to a natural passage to an ALM tool.

Actually, the proprietary ALM solutions are generally complex, split and expensive. The approach proposed by the modern forge developers allows a natural integration of the ALM tools, as :

- the project standardization thanks to the patterns,

- the possibility of parameter setting following the chosen methods (Scrum or other Agile methods, CMMI or quality).

- Or even the traceability of the requirements, tests, documents or taskswhich can be linked together.

Besides, the open source development opens up possibilities to integrate and adapt other tools to increase and diversify the features as Subversion, Git, CVS for versioning, Hudson for continuous integration, or Salomé TMF for test plan management.

The open source process makes easier the use of protocols and open standards as HTTP, XMPP, SOAP or LDAP.

Finally, it improves the contributions and the co-development model because it creates discussions with the users; so that the extensions developed were enough generic to be integrated into the application. So, all users benefit from it.

In fine, the open source is determinedly directed to the consumer, because of durability and search of innovation, and requires in return an investment in talents.

And you, what is your experience about the open source use? Share your reflections on this blog.

Mardi 12 janvier se tenait à l’INRIA (institut de recherche en informatique et en automatisme) près de Grenoble une après-midi de réflexion autour des méthodologies et des expériences de développement basées sur le logiciel libre.
Cette rencontre, organisées par Le club de veille technologique IN’Tech et l’association GRILOG (Grenoble Isère Logiciel), a été l’occasion d’échanger sur les retours d’expérience des différents acteurs présents, qu’ils soient dans le monde de l’industrie ou dans celui de la recherche.
Le cycle de conférence a été entrecoupé d’une séance de démonstration de produits et d’applications issus de l’open source, durant lequel un échange notamment sur l’organisation des équipes de développement, des fonctionnalités utilisées et du transfert de développement a pu être abordé.

Nicolas Guérin, responsable technique de Codendi, a ainsi présenté Codendi et son évolution : de la forge logicielle créée au sein de Xerox dans le but de rassembler les outils nécessaires pour le développement collaboratif à un passage naturel vers un outil d’ALM (Application Lifecycle Management).

En effet, les solutions ALM propriétaires sont en général complexes, morcelées et coûteuses. L’approche proposée par les forges modernes permet une intégration naturelle des outils ALM, comme par exemple pour :
- la standardisation des projets à l’aide de modèles,
- la possibilité de paramétrages en fonction des méthodes de gestion choisies (Scrum ou autres méthodes Agile, CMMI ou approche qualité),
- ou encore la traçabilité des exigences, tests, documents ou tâches qui peuvent être liés entre eux.

Par ailleurs, le développement open source ouvre la possibilité d’intégrer et d’adapter d’autres outils open source pour élargir le spectre des fonctionnalités telles que Subversion, Git, CVS en gestion de version, Hudson en intégration continue ou Salomé TMF en gestion de plans de test.
L’open source facilite l’utilisation de protocoles et standards ouverts comme HTTP, XMPP, SOAP ou LDAP.
Enfin, il améliore la contributions et modèle de co-développement car il engendre des discussions avec l’utilisateur afin que les extensions développées soient suffisamment génériques pour être intégrées à l’application; ainsi, tous les utilisateurs en bénéficient.

In fine, l’open source est résolument orienté vers le consommateur en terme de durabilité et de recherche d’innovation et requiert en échange un investissement dans les talents.

Et vous quelle est votre expérience d’utilisation de l’open source ? Faites-nous part de vos réflexions sur ce blog.

The Helios project is gradually going more open, as we start releasing and committing in the open into a SF.net project (heliosplatform).

Among the tools offered by SF.net we will use a blog (wordpress), the wiki (mediawiki) and the SVN, for a start.

The project’s SVN repo will be populated with all components we have developed, as we progressively switch our SVN hosting. The first piece we have committed is the Mantis OSLC REST server module.

It's time to start this blog with an interesting subject: online translation inside CodingTeam. This post is a full introduction to this new feature in the CodingTeam software forge.

As it stands in the release notes for the 0.9.2:

CodingTeam 0.9.2 reintroduces the gettext-based online translation system. It was already in our forge up to the 0.42 but this had disappeared with the full-rewrite of the 0.9. Now, you can easily translate your software online with CodingTeam! The process is simple: you upload a gettext translation model (a .pot file) and then users can translate all your strings in their language. If you already have a gettext translation file (a .po), you can upload it to automatically translate all the strings in the database. When you want to get the translated strings in order to release your software, just export the translation file for all available languages and it's done! And by the way, to prepare the next release, you will import your new .pot file, which will cause the automatical update of your strings database (deleted strings will be deactivated).

This feature is very new and we release it early to get feebacks on this implementation, in order to make it better and better with the time. But here it is, you can now translate your softwares with CodingTeam!

Thus I write this step-by-step howto in order to fully explain this feature, its use and operation to the CodingTeam users and more generally to anyone who may be interested.

Before starting, it is necessary to mention some important points. First, CodingTeam is a software forge, that means that you can do everything to develop your software in one place with varied tools from bugs tracker to source code management. This software can be used, if you have a free software (as in freedom) project, on the CodingTeam.net website!

The method used to implement internationalization (also known as i18n) inside the CodingTeam software forge is based on gettext. It's the GNU library for internationalization and localization. gettext is somewhat a de facto standard to develop multilingual programs. The use of this library is very simple. Programmers put their strings in the gettext function (commonly aliased _). Then, they run xgettext that generates a .pot file wich is a template (it means that this file contains the list of translatable strings extracted from the sources). Afterwards, the translator derives a .po file from this template with msginit or msgmerge and the translation is made in this file. He just send it back to the developer who uses msgfmt to generate a .mo file wich is a binary. These binary files will be used by the program.

With CodingTeam, all the translation work can be made online. The fact is that a lot of people are unwilling to use gettext. Therefore in the context of free software, an easy-to-use appliance can only increase the number of translators who will contribute to your project! And, in an enterprise, it's just necessary to save time.

First step: upload a .pot file.

Just click on the "Administration" link to enter the panel and select your base language.

If you're going to import a template of translatable strings of your programs currently written in English, thus your base lang is English. Just import this file and you're done, strings are now ready to be translated.

English is now hidden in the list of the internationalization homepage. This is because you won't translate strings that are already translated!

Second step: upload a .po file.

Now, you can import an existing translation files if you have it. Just fill this form and this language will be updated.

It's useful in order to maintain on a CodingTeam forge the translation that you've already started elsewhere. The .po import is designed for that and for prehistoric animals that still contribute to translation without using online interfaces.

Third step: translate a string.

The third step is the most interesting of all. Here is the translation string view:

You can see the string that you have to translate and the current proposed translation. If you are registered on the forge, you can add your own proposition (and tag it as translation, correction or reformulation). You can also see where this string is located in the sources (file and line number), this kind of information can be very useful to understand the meaning of a sentence taken out of context.

And below you have the revision history for this translation. Indeed, CodingTeam's internationalization system works as a sum of suggestions, the last one is the translation that ends up being used. Thus, to limit abuse, administrators can delete any suggestions.

When someone contribute to translations, this work is shown in the project's timeline (and therefore in the dashboards). You can also get (through this timeline's entry) a summary of all translation work made in a day by all translaters on all languages.

Fourth step: export a .po file.

Once translation work is finished, you can export the translated .po files. You will just have to compile .mo files from them.

Well done!

Well, you know everything you should know about CodingTeam's online translation system!

But, as I said in the release notes, this feature is very new. It lacks a lot of functionality and can be improved by the time. Some of the needed (and planned!) things to make this internationalization system better are:

• linking the source code repository and the internationalization system (update on commit, build and commit translation files…)
• handling plural forms

If you have another great idea, feel free to write it here!

Richard Matthew Stallman defines the free software by those 3 words :

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (In french in the text: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” which is the national motto of France). Present in Grenoble on Thursday, January 19th, without paper and in a fluent French, he presented the philosophy and the issue of the free software. Notice that Stallman is the free software father, founder of the GNU project and an outstanding evangelist of his philosophy. Evangelist is the right word:

he doesn’t hesitate to caricature his personality wearing monastic scapular and halo to close his show.

Therefore, during around two hours, Richard Stallman gave us his famous three words definition of the free software, defined the 4 fundamental freedoms (freedom to use the software, freedom to study the source code, freedom to redistribute copies, freedom to improve the program), explained how the proprietary software (sorry, user-subjugating

software!) are evil and addressed related issues like GNU/Linux, Hadopi or the free software at school. At the end, Richard Stallman presented himself as Saint IGNUcius and the guru accepted to answer the public questions.

Codendi, as a free software, had to be present at this talk. A reminder of the fundamentals by such a man of principles could not be a bad thing and allows us to strengthen our vision of the software evolution.

Have you participated to the conference? What are your thoughts about it?

PS: You can find some videos of his talk (FR) on the web.

Ces trois mots définissent la notion de logiciel libre selon Richard Matthew Stallman. Présent à Grenoble jeudi dernier, sans notes et dans un français tout à fait correct, il a présenté à son auditoire la philosophie et les enjeux du logiciel libre. Il faut rappeler que Stallman est le père du logiciel libre, fondateur du projet GNU et évangeliste hors pair de sa philosophie. Évangéliste est le mot : il n’hésite pas à caricaturer sa personnalité en enfilant toge et auréole pour clôturer son show.

Ainsi, pendant près de deux heures, Richard Stallman nous a présenté sa fameuse définition en trois mots du logiciel libre, a défini les 4 libertés fondamentales (liberté d’utiliser le logiciel, liberté d’étudier le code source, liberté de distribuer et liberté de contribuer), a expliqué en quoi les logiciels propriétaires (pardon, privateurs !) sont le mal et a abordé différents thèmes liés comme GNU/Linux, Hadopi ou encore le logiciel libre à l’école. Enfin après la présentation de Saint IGNUcius, le gourou a bien voulu répondre aux questions du public.

Codendi, en tant que lociciel libre, se devait d’être présent à ce discours. Une piqure de rappel par un homme de principe sur les fondamentaux ne fait pas de mal et permet de prendre du recul et d’asseoir la vision à long terme du chemin que doit garder la solution.

Avez-vous participé à la conférence ? Qu’en avez-vous pensé ?

PS: Pour ceux qui ont trouvé une bonne excuse pour ne pas y aller, on peut trouver des diffusions vidéos de son discours sur le net.

Le projet COCLICO invite les développeurs et utilisateurs de FusionForge à se retrouver à Issy les Moulineaux (France) le 3 février 2010 pour une journée destinée au travail technique sur ce logiciel.

Pour plus de détails veuillez vous référer à l’annonce en anglais : FusionForge developers/users meeting coming up, notamment pour les détails sur le contact des organisateurs.

OSLC-CM V1 is a proposed standard for REST APIs of bugtrackers, and in our seek for more interoperability in the bugtracker space, we’ve been very interested in it.

OSLC-CM is quite young and only so far implemented in proprietary tools (although elaborated in an open way) on the server side, and as we believe in FLOSS, we’ve started trying to implement basics of server side plugins for a few bugtrackers.
In addition to a demo server that’s simulating the behaviour of a bugtracker, we have started implementing a Mantis plugin and FusionForge and Codendi trackers add-ons (all PHP and based on Zend framework, see this project on picoforge). All are very basic, but we hope they will be the basis for future OSLC-CM compatible servers in these tools.

At the same time we’ve been experimenting with the code already published in Mylyn to support OSLC-CM on the client side. Not everything is public yet in Mylyn, as the elements that have been developped for some connectors of Tasktop to the proprietary tools are being ported to the open source code of Mylyn.
We have thus been able to use the Junit tests classes of Mylyn and tweak them in a way to connect to an instance of the demo server for Mantis (including handling some Basic auth), and be able to retrieve the first bugs descriptions

Now that this works, we’ll try and add some Java code (maybe reusing Mylyn client libs) to doc4 (being developped as part of Helios) in order to start linking doc4 and Mantis so that this can be used in the Helios platform. This may involve mixing code of XWiki and Mylyn… hmmm… well, we’ll see.

Next steps may be also to try and implement a connector in Python that might be used in tools like bts-link.

Then whichever Python or Java client libraries we have, will allow us to use them inside FetchBugs4.me to connect and harvest bugs of OSLC-CM compliant bugtrackers eventually.

Lots of interesting developments ahead. Stay tuned.

OSLC-CM V1 is a proposed standard for REST APIs of bugtrackers, and in our seek for more interoperability in the bugtracker space, we’ve been very interested in it.

OSLC-CM is quite young and only so far implemented in proprietary tools (although elaborated in an open way) on the server side, and as we believe in FLOSS, we’ve started trying to implement basics of server side plugins for a few bugtrackers.
In addition to a demo server that’s simulating the behaviour of a bugtracker, we have started implementing a Mantis plugin and FusionForge and Codendi trackers add-ons (all PHP and based on Zend framework, see this project on picoforge). All are very basic, but we hope they will be the basis for future OSLC-CM compatible servers in these tools.

At the same time we’ve been experimenting with the code already published in Mylyn to support OSLC-CM on the client side. Not everything is public yet in Mylyn, as the elements that have been developped for some connectors of Tasktop to the proprietary tools are being ported to the open source code of Mylyn.
We have thus been able to use the Junit tests classes of Mylyn and tweak them in a way to connect to an instance of the demo server for Mantis (including handling some Basic auth), and be able to retrieve the first bugs descriptions

Now that this works, we’ll try and add some Java code (maybe reusing Mylyn client libs) to doc4 (being developped as part of Helios) in order to start linking doc4 and Mantis so that this can be used in the Helios platform. This may involve mixing code of XWiki and Mylyn… hmmm… well, we’ll see.

Next steps may be also to try and implement a connector in Python that might be used in tools like bts-link.

Then whichever Python or Java client libraries we have, will allow us to use them inside FetchBugs4.me to connect and harvest bugs of OSLC-CM compliant bugtrackers eventually.

Lots of interesting developments ahead. Stay tuned.

News is slow this month on the FusionForge development front. We're all busy gathering all the things that we want to go into the next release, but there's no big news from the code. However, there is something of interest.

You may have heard about the Coclico project, which is an initiative aiming at collaboration and convergence between several forge engines, most notably FusionForge, Codendi and Novaforge. That project was started last October, and it holds regular meetings with its members. The next meeting is scheduled for the 2nd of February in Paris, and we thought we could host an open meeting on the 3rd for non-Coclico members, a bit like the forge meeting we had last year (which is when FusionForge was officially born), but with an emphasis on what Coclico did so far. Since most of the FusionForge hackers are in Western Europe, and several are in Paris (especially if we add those who go to Paris for the Coclico meeting), we thought it would also be a good opportunity to gather for a technical and social meeting.

It seems the Coclico open session didn't generate much interest this time (at least, it hasn't so far), so I proposed to hijack the room for this FusionForge meeting, and I didn't hear any objections. I have several themes I'd like to discuss with people, and possibly start implementing during that day:

• database maintenance and schema: unification of the upgrade scripts (including for plugins), cleanup of obsolete stuff, addition of missing constraints, and so on;
• configuration system: my initial prototype didn't raise many objections (at least in its scope), now what to do with the next steps?
• packaging and installation system: what needs to be done to keep the three ways of installation (manual, *.deb, *.rpm) in sync with as little work as possible?
• permissions system: clarification of what happens currently, ideas for evolution;
• plugins and interaction with external software: do we lack stuff that would make this easier?
• roadmap, long-term plans, this sort of things;
• other things that users may want to discuss with hackers?
• possibly drink a beer or two;

…and so on. These are in no way specific to FusionForge, and in fact I think it would be great if hackers/users of other forges were present, because we could benefit a great deal from their experience and plans. But if we find ourselves amongst FF people only, I think these would be good to discuss, possibly write some code for, and go home with a clearer picture of where our efforts should focus in the near future.

I'd therefore like to invite interested people to mark the 3rd of February on their agendas. The meeting will take place in Issy-les-Moulineaux (near Paris, within reach of the tube). If you're interested, please get in touch with us (#FusionForge on the FreeNode IRC network, or the fusionforge-general mailing-list), so we can have a rough estimate of how many people to expect. The meeting room is provided by France Télécom, and they're probably going to need numbers if not names. Further details will be announced when known.

Alright, here is the first post on the CodingTeam blog!

To celebrate this new release (and this new year), I open this blog. This will not contain releases notes, there is already the project news for that. So, let me explain the goal of this blog. It's intended to be a place for the CodingTeam community (formed by users and administrators) to get news about the project and where they will be able to participate in the future of the project, by writing their advices on the posts. This will also be a place where people will find informations and news about the project.

This blog will be updated monthly with subjects related to CodingTeam or the software forges in general, so you don't have to know everything about CodingTeam in order to read this blog. This blog will also speak about projects that use CodingTeam, in a "Project of the Month" category. By the way, if you are using CodingTeam for your project(s), feel free to contact me!

The releases notes of the new 0.9.2 release can be found here and you can download it here.

Thus, the appointment is made! See you soon.

L’année 2009 a été riche en évènements pour Codendi :

- la création de notre site communautaire Codendi.org en juin donne accès à chacun au code source de  Codendi Labs, afin que tous puissent contribuer au développement de Codendi et échanger sur son utilisation. Elle accompagne la sortie de Codendi 4.0 et ses nouvelles fonctionnalités :

• l’intégration continue avec Hudson,
• le système automatique de références croisées,
• les tableaux de bords projets/personnels,
• l’extension du système de permissions.

- la mise en place du projet Coclico en partenariat avec d’autres acteurs tels l’INRIA, Bull, Orange Labs qui a démarré le 1er octobre. Il vise à renforcer la dynamique autour des plates-formes de forges, indispensables pour le développement collaboratif de logiciels, et notamment en permettant un échange de réflexion sur les différentes forges et une optimisation des fonctionnalités pour une utilisation industrielle et de meilleure qualité.

- Notre rencontre au sein de l’Agile Tour avec d’autres acteurs pour échanger sur les pratiques optimales en termes de méthodes agiles, et comprendre comment développer au mieux Codendi pour faciliter son utilisation dans le cadre d’application de ces méthodes.

- La certification de nos 2 collègues, Nicolas Terray en PHP avec la Certification Zend PHP 5, et Marc Nazarian ScrumMaster en méthode Agile de type Scrum démontre l’intérêt de nos équipes pour se perfectionner dans des domaines de développement de projets logiciels, ce qui contribue à la qualité du niveau de support et de développement de l’équipe Codendi.

Grâce à ces évènements, notre équipe est toujours au plus près de vos besoins pour vous apporter des services adaptés d’installation, de formation, de maintenance et de support via Codendi Pro.

Nous poursuivrons en 2010 cette recherche de qualité de services en renforçant notre partenariat initié fin 2008 avec SupInfo dans l’accompagnement des étudiants à la gestion de projets, en proposant une nouvelle offre hébergée, et avec la version Codendi 4.2 prévue pour le printemps 2010 notamment.

D’ici là, je vous souhaite de bonnes fêtes de fin d’année, en vous remerciant de nous suivre dans l’aventure qui voit grandir Codendi chaque jour…

Pour mon premier billet sur ce blog, je voulais vous raconter une petite histoire qui est arrivée il y a quelques semaines, lors de notre dernière itération.

Il était une fois …

Quand nous avons décidé de réécrire le moteur des trackers, nous avons voulu essayer le Test Driven Development (TDD, ou Développement Piloté par les Tests en français).

Nous appliquons Scrum dans l’équipe depuis pas mal de temps. Bien que le TDD ne soit pas obligatoire dans Scrum (il est plutôt conseillé dans la méthodologie XP), il n’est bien sûr pas interdit !

Depuis la dernière version de Codendi, l’intégration continue avec Hudson est proposée et intégré dans la plateforme.

Nous avions donc déjà toutes nos branches de support et de développement sous intégration continue (voir la copie d’écran).

On se lance !

Tout était donc prêt pour commencer notre expérience du TDD. Nous avons choisi de faire du TDD en pair-programming, parce que c’était quelque chose d’assez nouveau pour nous. On faisait donc d’une pierre deux coups : essayer le TDD et essayer le pair-programming en même temps.

Au départ notre objectif était double :

• faire émerger le design par les tests

• avoir des tests unitaires.

Nous ne savions alors pas que ces quelques graines semées allaient nous donner une aussi bonne récolte !

+106 %

Tout d’abord, nous avons augmenté le nombre de tests de manière significative, ce qui est une bonne chose pour les clients, mais également pour l’équipe de développement. Notre logiciel devient de plus en plus robuste !

Nous avons augmenté les tests de +106% (de 197 tests au départ sur les trackers à 407 aujourd’hui) et ce n’est pas fini !

L’essayer, c’est l’adopter !

Deuxièmement, c’était plutôt amusant ! Et nous avons constaté avec surprise que ça a donné envie aux autres membres de l’équipe d’essayer. Ainsi le TDD a rapidement été adopté par l’équipe qui travaille sur le workflow, et celle qui travaille sur Git (un système de gestion de code source décentralisé).

Mais il y a un autre bénéfice que nous n’avions pas vu venir : cela a renforcé l’esprit d’équipe. Les gens étaient vraiment contents de travailler ensemble, et tout le monde se sentait concerné par les tests unitaires, et par la bonne santé du build Hudson.

On continue dans la bonne direction

Nous alloons donc continuer nos efforts dans ce sens, et faire de la prochaine version 4.2 un succes.

Et vous, avez-vous des histoires similaires concernant le TDD, le pair-programming ou d’autres pratiques agiles ?

Si oui, n’hésitez à les partager avec nous !

For my first post on this blog, I’m going to tell you a short story that happened a few weeks ago, during our last iteration.

Once upon a time…

When we decided to rewrite our tracker engine, we experimented Test Driven Development (TDD). TDD is not a required practice in Scrum, but it is not forbidden at all!

Since the last Codendi release, continuous integration with Hudson has been integrated in our platform.

We already had all our support and development branches under continuous integration (see screenshot).

Let’s start!

So everything was set up for a great Test Driven Development experience! We chose to try TDD with pair-programming, because it was quite a new thing for us, so we had two birds with one stone: two people experiencing TDD and pair-programming in the meantime. At the beginning, there was two identified goals:

• see the design emerge from the tests

• have unit tests

What we did not know at this time, was that our small seed would generate amazing benefits!

+106 %

First of all, we increase dramatically the number of tests of the platform, which is a really good news for both customers and development team. The software becomes gradually more robust.

We increase the number of tests by +106% (from initially 197 tests on trackers up to 407), and it is not finished!

Try it, adopt it!

Moreover, it was fun! And surprisingly, it incited other team members to try it. So TDD spread to the team that was working on workflow, and the one working on distributed version control Git.

Another thing we did not see coming was that it strengthened the team spirit. People were really happy to work together, and everyone was concerned about the unit tests, and the Hudson build.

Keep up the good job

So we will definitely keep going that way, and make our next release 4.2 a great success.

And you, do you have similar stories with TDD, pair-programming or agile practices?

We’re working on implementing a demo/test server for the OSLC-CM V1 protocol, in order to help test client tools.

We’ve released (under a BSD license) a first 0.1 preliminary version that only supports GET queries, that’ll lead the way to an expected complete demo server of OSLC-CM V1 when the 1.0 version will be finished.

At the moment, it will only provide a minimal REST implementation of a PHP server using zend, and will produce JSON or XML/RDF views of fictionnal bugs contructed out of contents of a CSV file.

More details may be found at : https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Oslc/Web/, whereas the code is in the Download page there.

FusionForge-4.8.2: * Maintenance release, security and bugfixes.

From Monday 30^th November, it’s Fedwa who backs up the marketing activity for a few months. Indeed, Manon has a more personal project to achieve as she’s awaiting a happy event for the beginning of next year. She hands over to Fedwa who will animate notably the website and other internet tools. Of course you can get in touch with her for any questions or remarks about Codendi and if you want to share news about open-source: fedwa.jebbor@codendi.com

 

« Hello to everybody. Thanks for welcoming me and see you soon to share our experience about open-source and Codendi.» Fedwa

 

« See you soon… » Manon

A partir de Lundi 30 Novembre , c’est Fedwa qui va reprendre l’activité marketing pour quelques mois. En effet, Manon a un projet plus personnel à accomplir puisqu’elle attend un heureux événement prévu pour début d’année prochaine. Elle passe le relais à Fedwa qui va poursuivre notamment l’animation du site web et des outils internet. Bien entendu, vous pouvez prendre contact avec elle pour toutes questions ou remarques concernant Codendi ou si vous souhaitez partager une actualité sur l’open-source : fedwa.jebbor@codendi.com

 « Bonjour à tous. Merci de m’accueillir et à très vite pour partager notre expérience autour de l’open-source et Codendi.» Fedwa

 

« Je vous retrouve bientôt… » Manon

I normally don't relay security announces for GForge or FusionForge on this blog, but I will make an exception this time: Alain Peyrat found several places in the code with insufficient input sanitizing, which can cause cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (CVE-2009-3303). It's been fixed in the 4.7 and 4.8 branches as well as the trunk of FusionForge (and in Debian Sid and Squeeze), and updated Debian packages for GForge 4.5 and 4.7rc2 have been released for users of the Etch and Lenny distributions.

The reason I make an exception for announcing this here is to remind people that I appear to be the only one maintaining code for GForge 4.5. I do that for two reasons: first, because I'm the maintainer of the package in Debian, and Debian Etch has GForge 4.5, and Etch is supported for security fixes; second, because I also admin/maintain an instance for a client of mine, so I need to backport the fixes anyway, and making them public is no bother. Both of these reasons are going to vanish sometime in the not too distant future: security support for Etch will end in February, 2010, and I hope to have migrated my client's forge to FusionForge 4.8 by then too. A direct consequence is that I will probably stop maintenance for GForge 4.5 in the coming months (at least I'll stop doing it in my free time).

So if you're still using GForge 4.5, you should really consider upgrading to something supported, either GForge AS (free download from the GForge Group) or FusionForge (free as in Free Software). Both have an upgrade path. Obviously I think FusionForge is a better choice, but my position is probably biased.

Nicolas Terray, one of the Codendi development engineers has just been awarded the Zend PHP 5 certification. With this high level certification, Nicolas wanted to make his expertise level he has been mobilizing for 5 years to Codendi recognized. The certification is about the last stable php version, PHP 5 and it is awarded by Zend, the PHP Company. Nicolas passed the exam that is answer in less than 90 minutes to 70 questions about various issues, from basis knowledge until the more complex subtleties of the language. All our congratulations!

 

In the same time, Marc Nazarian has followed a training for Scrum agile project management in order to gain the ScrumMaster certification. Scrum agile project management is totally different to the traditional project management. Instead of planning, controlling and leading, the ScrumMaster plays the role of being a driving force within the team. He has to help the development team to communicate, to work in an iterative way and to continuously improve itself while keeping an eye on the real goal of the project. Marc passed with success this training for certification that requires skills for, on one hand, favor communication in the team and, on the other hand, keep in mind the objective of delivering at time a software of quality. Well done!

 

These high level awards show the quality of the support and development Codendi team. Once again, congratulations to Nicolas and Marc !

Nicolas Terray, un des ingénieurs de développement Codendi vient d’obtenir la Certification Zend PHP 5. Par le biais de cette certification haut niveau, Nicolas souhaitait faire reconnaitre son niveau d’expertise élevé qu’il met au service de Codendi depuis bientôt 5 ans. La certification porte sur la dernière version stable de php, PHP 5, et est attribuée par Zend, la PHP company comme elle aime s’intituler. Nicolas a passé l’examen consistant à répondre en moins de 90 minutes à 70 questions traitant de problématiques variées, allant des connaissances de bases jusqu’aux subtilités les plus complexes du langage. Toutes nos félicitations !

Dans le même temps, Marc Nazarian a suivi une formation sur la gestion de projet agile de type Scrum pour obtenir la certification ScrumMaster. La gestion de projet agile de type Scrum est complètement différente de la gestion de projet traditionnelle. Au lieu de planifier, contrôler et diriger, le gestionnaire de projet agile Scrum, le ScrumMaster, agit comme «moteur» au sein de l’équipe. Il a pour rôle d’aider l’équipe de développement à communiquer, à travailler de façon itérative et à s’améliorer constamment tout en veillant à ce que l’équipe reste concentrée sur le véritable objectif du projet.

Marc a réussi avec succès cette formation certifiante qui requiert des qualités pour, à la fois, favoriser la communication dans une équipe tout en en gardant à l’esprit l’objectif de livraison d’un logiciel de qualité dans les délais. Bravo à lui !

 

Ces reconnaissances de haut niveau démontrent la qualité du niveau de support et de développement de l’équipe Codendi. Toutes nos félicitations à Nicolas et Marc !

 

 

 

Project leaders, managers, architects, developers, where do you find useful information to identify software solutions answering your requirements?

Share with us your working approach. Tell us what ways of communication you consult.

• Precise your profil: project leaders, managers, architects, developers…
• then information channels you use by priority :
- search engine : what key words
- subscription to news/ rss feeds: which one
- referring websites : which one
- publications : which one
- associations/clubs/communities/forums : which one
- other :

Thanks for your experience. We’ll let you know about the results of this study.

Chefs de projets, responsables, architectes, développeurs, quels moyens de communication utilisez-vous pour identifier les solutions logicielles qui répondent à vos besoins ?

Partager avec nous votre façon de travailler. Dites-nous quels vecteurs de communication vous consultez.

- Précisez-nous votre profil : chef de projets, responsable qualité / processus
architecte, développeur,…

- Puis les vecteurs d’information que vous utilisez par ordre d’importance:
- moteur de recherche : quels mots clefs
- inscription news/ flux rss: lesquels
- sites web référents : lesquels
- magazines/journaux : lesquels
- associations/clubs/communautés/forums : lesquels
- autre :

Merci d’avance de votre expérience. Nous vous communiquerons les résultats de cette étude.

This month hasn't seen many big changes happen in FusionForge. Notable improvements include an initial search engine for Word files, fixes to the automated builds and tests, and lots of bugfixes.

The biggest news is probably the start of the Coclico project, an initiative bringing together developers and users of several existing forges in order to reduce the gap (and ideally unify the codebase across the forks) and work together in some fields where cooperation is important. Subjects include a generalisation of the current identity/permission/authentication models and systems, data exchange and migration, interoperability, integration of agile development methods inside the forge, and better integration with the desktop applications such as IDEs. The participants include NovaForge, Codendi, and of course FusionForge. The project only officially started early this month, but we hope to be able to demonstrate results soon.

Business as usual apart from that.

 Le ScrumMaster de l’équipe Codendi était à l’Agile Tour Grenoble Mardi 20 Octobre pour rencontrer les acteurs locaux actifs dans le domaine et suivre les conférences, forums et ateliers sur la méthodologie et les dernières pratiques d’ingénierie. Le succès de l’évènement, tant sur le plan de l’affluence (plus de 300 personnes) que sur le plan de la qualité des intervenants et des conférences, nous conforte dans l’idée que les méthodes agiles sont de plus en plus adoptées dans le monde industriel. Le succès croissant de ces méthodes nous montre que nous avons su prendre le virage de l’agilité au bon moment en proposant depuis la version 3.6 un support pour Scrum.

 

Dans les versions à venir,  Codendi souhaite encore renforcer ses outils pour faciliter la mise en œuvre des méthodes agiles.

L’objectif de ce tour d’horizon à l’Agile Tour était donc de bénéficier des illustrations et retours d’expériences pour identifier les meilleures pratiques et les écueils à éviter.

 

L’un des principes fondamentaux des méthodes agiles est la capacité d’adaptation aux changements de contexte et aux modifications de spécifications intervenant pendant le processus de développement. Tout l’enjeu consiste à appliquer concrètement ce grand principe qui parait évident mais qui n’est pas toujours simple à mettre en oeuvre en entreprise.

 

Ce qu’il existe déjà dans Codendi

Pour faciliter l’implémentation de l’agilité, Codendi permet déjà de créer des «templates de projets» c’est-à-dire des modèles, qui peuvent être configurés pour répondre spécifiquement à la méthodologie : outils de suivi dédié, graphiques adaptés, structure et modèles de documents, etc. Un projet créé à partir d’un modèle hérite de sa configuration et des outils adaptés. En quelques minutes il est donc possible de créer à partir du modèle un espace projet conforme à la méthodologie. Bien entendu, le projet reste configurable  si besoin est pour s’adapter aux besoins spécifiques de l’équipe.

 

Codendi propose un outil de suivi dédié à la gestion des backlogs. Il ressemble à un outil de suivi de tâches mais comprend des champs spécifiques aux méthodes agiles : champ « backlog » (Backlog de Sprint / Backlog de Projet), champ « estimation » (en points ou en jours), champs « Numéro de Sprint », « Release cible », etc.

En complément, la prise de notes suite aux réunions quotidiennes peut se faire dans le wiki, il est possible d’archiver des livraisons intermédiaires et les échanges itératifs avec les clients sont facilités grâce aux outils de communication tels que les listes de distribution, les forums ou la messagerie instantanée. Ceci est particulièrement vrai  si vous mettez en place les méthodologies agiles avec des équipes distribuées.

 

Des idées à retenir pour la suite

Les travaux actuellement entrepris sur les trackers  vont dans ce sens. La prochaine étape pour Codendi pourrait être par exemple, la possibilité de créer des « burn down et burn up charts » qui représentent visuellement le reste à faire pour terminer chaque livrable. Ces graphiques sont intéressants car ils permettent de réestimer et anticiper les échéances futures en cours de développement.

 

Codendi 4.2 fournira également une bibliothèque de trackers plus étoffée, ainsi qu’un mécanisme d’import/export des trackers qui apportera plus de souplesse aux équipes projet.

 

En conclusion, l’Agile Tour a permis d’identifier les axes prioritaires pour appliquer l’agilité et a été l’occasion de sensibiliser l’équipe Codendi qui travaille avec cette méthode et souhaite la renforcer.

 

 Vous aussi, faites-nous part de vos idées pour encore mieux adapter Codendi à l’agilité.

 

 

Xerox-Codendi is a sponsor of the Embedded Systems Exhibition, an event organized by Minalogic, the global competitive cluster in micro nanotechnologies and embedded software in Grenoble.

Grenoble city hosts two major events in the field of embedded systems on October 2009: the Embedded Systems Week and the Embedded Linux Conference Europe.

The Embedded Systems Exhibition will take place at this occasion on the 14-15 October 2009.  It will gather high level embedded systems experts around technical booths and demonstrations.

 

Codendi will be presented there as it is a particularly adapted tool for managing embedded system software development projects. Indeed, working with Codendi allows to:

-          consolidate ALM tools in an integrated web-based  platform,

-          securely manage projects even with distributed teams,

-          speed innovation and project completion,

-          customized the opened platform and adapt it to your industrial environment.

That’s why our customers in semi-conductors or R&D telecommunications sectors are using Codendi for years.

 

Come to meet us and discover Codendi at the booth n°18.

 

Useful information

Free entrance

Dates and schedule: October 14 & 15, from 9 AM to 5 PM.

Event location

World Trade Center
5-7, place Robert Schuman
BP 1521
Grenoble cedex 1- France

Maps and Hotels : Information available on the World Trade Center’s website:
http://www.europole-congres.com/infos_pratiques.htm

More information on the Embedded Systems Exhibition

 

Le projet Coclico a démarré le 1er octobre dernier, et une infrastructure de développement collaboratif a été mise en place pour héberger ses travaux. L'organisation des sous-projets n'est pas définitive, mais les discussions peuvent d'ores et déjà commencer. Pour suivre l'évolution des choses, ça se passe sur https://forge.projet-coclico.org/

C’est dans les locaux de Telecom ParisTech que les membres du projet Coclico se sont réunis pour la réunion de lancement. Entreprises, instituts de recherche et académiques ont fait plus ample connaissance et ont déroulé les différentes thématiques de travail qui vont être développées autour des plateformes collaboratives open-source de développement logiciel, dites « forges »:

§         La gestion d’identités et les politiques de confidentialité : l’objectif est d’améliorer la capacité d’intégration d’outils hétérogènes et fournir un ensemble cohérent de gestion des utilisateurs, des groupes et des accès.

§         L’interopérabilité et les échanges de données : l’idée est de développer des fonctions d’administration permettant l’import, l’export, la migration de projets et d’équipes entre forges.

§         L’adaptation des outils et méthodologies : cela consiste à donner des outils aux chefs de projet permettant la mise en œuvre de méthodologies au sein de leurs équipes.

§         La traçabilité et l’intégration continue : il s’agit d’assurer la traçabilité des artefacts et d’en automatiser la collecte dans le cadre d’un processus d’intégration continue.

§         L’intégration avec le poste client : l’objet est de favoriser l’accès à d’autres outils de développement ou de gestion de projet en développant par exemple des plugins avec les environnements de développement (IDE).

 

Xerox participe à tous les groupes de travail. Il est coordinateur sur 2 packages fonctionnels qui l’intéressent particulièrement pour le développement de Codendi :

 

• L’adaptation des outils et méthodologies

Xerox et les autres participants à ce package vont travailler à proposer des solutions permettant de faciliter la mise en œuvre de méthodologies de type SCRUM et CMMI en se concentrant sur deux axes:

- La mise en œuvre de modèles dans la forge: modèles de projets, d’outils de suivi, de documents, permettant de facilement créer un nouveau projet configuré pour répondre immédiatement aux besoins de la méthodologie de développement.

- Un travail sur la flexibilité des outils, afin de les personnaliser pour répondre à des besoins méthodologiques différents: gestion des exigences, des risques, des cas d’utilisation (use case), rapports élaborés (reporting): couverture des exigences, rapports temporels, etc.

 

• La traçabilité et l’intégration continue

L’objectif de ce package est d’assurer la traçabilité des artefacts d’un projet de développement logiciel et d’en automatiser la collecte dans le cadre d’un processus d’intégration continue. Les acteurs du projet vont s’intéresser à l’historisation des livraisons produites par le système d’intégration continue comprenant la traçabilité entre la livraison produite, le code source, la modélisation UML, les tâches, la gestion des changements (exigences, bugs), la couverture de tests et les exigences implémentées.

 

Ces thématiques sont de plus en plus importantes parmi les équipes de développement qui ont bien compris l’enjeu des méthodologies et des processus qualité.  Les résultats de ces packages apporteront une réelle valeur ajoutée aux chefs de projets et qualité.

 

La prochaine réunion Coclico se fera le 24 Novembre à Grenoble dans les locaux d’Objet Direct.

We have started the COCLICO project this friday, with a meeting grouping many actors coming from various french regions, that operate in the area of open source forges (around FusionForge, NovaForge, Codendi, Trac, PicoForge, etc.). It’s a “Pôle de Compétitivité” (french R&D clusters) project which is funded by french public agencies, under the frame of both the FLOSS thematic group of System@tic (Paris) and Minalogic (Grenoble).

COCLICO will last 2 years and will let us all collaborate on producing FLOSS components that should allow much more interoperability between the open source forges, and probably deliver interesting standards that should allow to integrate forges with more tools in order to support new uses. We have no website yet, but it will be setup next week.

Of course a collaboration project with many companies (with various profiles, from the single consultant to the very large corporations) and academics is always requiring some effort so that everyone collaborates, but we have a strong focus on producing code as first steps, and I’m quite confident we all believe that FLOSS is necessary to share the innovation efforts.

I hope it will be a great occasion to bring interesting new things in the FLOSS ecosystem, and that we’ll manage to let others participate even if they are not funded by COCLICO, since one of the goals of the project is to bring momentum in the general forges ecosystem.

As far as we’re concerned at Institut TELECOM, we’re leading two workpackages on interoperability and community/ecosystem.

I’m very excited about this project, which together with our running Helios project should allow us to contribute in a significant way to FLOSS development tools and to the general quality of the FLOSS development process.

Expect more spamming from me about forges in the future on this blog

Update : we now have a website both with more details in french (including a description of the project’s work-packages) and in english (still empty at the moment, working on it).

We have setup, as part of our work in Helios, a very early demonstrator of a database of RDF facts about bugs in several distributions (currently Debian and Mandriva), in order to try and validate the Ontology describing bugs that we develop.

Here’s a pointer to the first webcast on fetchbugs4.me’s blog, with more details.

I’ve attended this morning the OWF session on the future Semantic Desktops, with excellent presentations by Stefan Decker (DERI) on the concepts of the Semantic Web and the Social Semantic Desktop, by the Zeitgeist project guys (Seif Lofty and Alexander Gabriel), and finally by Sebastian Trüg demonstrating the Nepomuk semantic desktop components in KDE.

It was a good occasion to meet these people (together with Henry Story) and talk a little bit about our efforts in the area of bugtracking and Semantic Web, and to discuss the future of the Baetle ontology, and do more teasing for fetchbugs4.me.

I hope some day, we integrate the models and tools so that bugs filed on bugtrackers can be referenced and manipulated with Desktop tools through interoperable APIs and common ontologies. More work ahead of us in Helios

I’ll be giving a speech on Saturday about our efforts in Helios to foster interoperability between bugtrackers and bugs modeling on the Semantic Web : Bugtracking sur le web sémantique. See you in La cité des Sciences in Paris Saturday at 14:00 (free entrance).

La plupart des membres seront présents à l‘Open World Forum, sommet international pour les logiciels libres et l’open-source qui se déroulera les 1 et 2 Octobre 2009 à Paris. C’est donc en parallèle de cet évènement qu’ils entameront leur collaboration.

La réunion permettra de faire le point sur l’organisation et le déroulement des prochaines étapes de co-développement jusqu’à mi-2011.

Nous vous tiendrons bien entendu informé de l’avancée des travaux.

 

 

 

 Let’s start! The Coclico project is about to be officially launched.

 

As a reminder, this project is developped with the collaboration of the French competitive clusters Minalogic and Systématic. It aims at improving the interoperability of open-source forges and sharing new tools. It gathers different stakeholders: research centres, large companies -Bull, Orange & Xerox-, and SMEs.  

 

Most of the project members will attend the Open World Forum, international summit for free software and open-source that will be held on the 1^st and 2^nd October 2009 in Paris. Thus, it is at the same time that they will begin their collaboration. The meeting will allow to check in the work process and the next steps for co-development until mid-2011. We will keep you informed about how the work is progressing.

Here's another round of the semi-regular bulletin about FusionForge.

First item: FusionForge 4.8.1 was released this week. It's not exactly an important update, but the 4.8 branch had been accumulating fixes over time and we felt that it would be good to push these fixes out. If you don't encounter particular problems, there's probably no need to upgrade in a hurry.

A follow-up for the rewrite of the SCM subsystem: I now consider the Bazaar and Git plugins complete. The missing part, in both cases, was a proper integration of a repository browser and the collection of commit statistics; since one of my clients wants to use Bazaar and another one wants Git, both features have been completed recently. The code still lives on a branch based off 4.8 (for people who need a 4.8-based instance), but it's also been pushed into trunk so the next release will have it natively.

Another branch I've been working on (for clients) was about making the Mediawiki plugin able to handle one wiki per project rather than one shared wiki. This is now possible with yet another 4.8-based branch, where the wiki creation is completely automated. A nice feature is that the FusionForge identification is used as a basis for Mediawiki, with different groups on the wiki depending on project membership and role in the forge. That allows specifying wiki permissions in a simple way, for instance to say that only project members can create new pages, authenticated users can only edit existing pages, and non-authenticated users are read-only. This code will be pushed to trunk in the coming weeks.

Thanks to Alain Peyrat, we now have a buildbot running Hudson for unit tests and a few other things. The coverage isn't complete yet, but we hope to increase it as time passes. It's already proven useful, by ensuring at least correctness of PHP syntax, encoding and line-endings.

I think that's about it for this time. Business as usual.

 Code-Opus, the official reseller of Codendi accredited by Xerox, gains the public contract to provide the Software Applications Centre of the French National Navy with a software forge. This Centre works on software applications for the French Navy but also on applications for Inter-armed Forces and Ministries. The National Navy needed a collaborative work platform offering tools for control project scope in order to improve its software development processes.

 

 After consulting the companies in this market, the contracting Authority chose the Codendi solution and trusted Code-Opus for the installation, the configuration, the training and the maintenance of the platform. Codendi will allow to launch new software application projects in various areas as human resources, logistics, contracts and finances.

 

 

 “We are glad to have been selected for this project. Answering the defense sector’s requirements demands to have an adapted, competitive and efficient offer. Codendi made the difference: it is a powerful and stable solution with an offer which provides consulting, support and evolution of the product. Codendi team will gather all its capabilities to support the project management teams and guarantee required the service quality level.» Manon Midy, Marketing & Customer Manager 

FusionForge-4.8.1: * Maintenance release, only bugfixes.

   Depuis  l’ouverture  du  site  communautaire codendi.org début Juin, plus de 10 000 téléchargements de Codendi Labs ont été effectués. Nous en profitons pour remercier tous ceux qui ont souhaité découvrir Codendi par ce biais.

 

Aujourd’hui, nous vous invitons à être actif et à participer à Codendi Labs. Que vous soyez étudiant, développeur, architecte ou chef de projet, vous pouvez apporter vos compétences. 

 

POURQUOI DEVENIR UN TOP CONTRIBUTEUR ?

•  Construisez votre crédibilité dans votre domaine d’expertise

•  Accélérez votre réputation en participant à un projet open-source

•  Boostez votre visibilité en restant actif

 

Les  Tops   Contributeurs  seront  les membres qui participent le plus à l’animation de la communauté sur codendi.org. Pour les récompenser, ils seront reconnus et régulièrement présentés sur le site communautaire ainsi que dans les newsletters.

 

 

COMMENT CONTRIBUER ?

Tout d’abord vous devez créer un nouveau compte pour devenir membre de la communauté. Vous pourrez ainsi :

 • Partager l’environnement sur lequel vous avez téléchargé Codendi,

 • Posez vos questions et trouver des réponses dans les forums,

 • Soumettre un bug que vous avez identifié,

   •  Apporter  vos compétences techniques en fournissant un patch correctif ou proposer votre propre plugin.

 

Plus vous  participez, plus  vous  augmentez  vos chances de  devenir un Top Contributeur. A vous de jouer.

 

 Code-Opus, le revendeur officiel de Codendi agréé par Xerox, remporte le marché public de la fourniture d’une forge logicielle pour le Centre Informatique des Applications Métiers (CIAM) de la Marine Nationale. Le CIAM travaille à la production de logiciels sous pilotage de l’antenne des Systèmes d’Information d’Administration et de Gestion des États-Majors de la Marine (EMM-SIAG), pour des applications Marine, mais également pour des applications Interarmées et Ministérielles. La Marine Nationale recherchait une plateforme de travail collaborative comprenant des outils pour le pilotage avancé des projets dans le but de normaliser ses processus de production logiciel.

Après consultation des acteurs du marché, le maître d’ouvrage a choisi la solution Codendi et a confié l’installation, la configuration, la formation et la maintenance de la plateforme à Code-Opus. Codendi va permettre de lancer de nouveaux projets d’applications informatiques dans des domaines variés tels que les ressources humaines, la logistique, les marchés ou les finances.

« Nous  sommes fiers d’avoir été retenus pour ce projet. Répondre aux exigences du secteur de la défense requiert de disposer d’une offre adaptée, compétitive et efficace. Codendi a su faire la différence : c’est une solution riche et éprouvée,  complétée d’une offre de conseil, de support et d’évolution du produit. L’équipe Codendi va mobiliser toutes ces compétences pour accompagner les équipes pluridisciplinaires de directions de projet et garantir le niveau de qualité de service demandé» Manon Midy, Responsable Marketing & Clientèle

To summarize some ideas and try and promote the work we’ve done in the frame of Helios, we’ve submitted a short paper (PDF) to the triplification challenge.

Alas, others had better projects, and we didn’t win, apparently. Still, we’ll continue to work beyond these initial demonstrators, in order to try and push for a standard of interchange of “facts” / meta-data about bugs, for instance as RDF using the EvoOnt BOM ontology plus our extensions.

The paper describes the 2 first demonstrators that we’ve setup (and for which I previously blogged) : one for the triplification of bugzilla, and one for the triplification about Debian bugs, using UDD to do so.

Abstract: To interconnect bugtrackers, and especially the one used to manage free
software projects, one need tools to convert their custom format to a common interop-
erable form. We, in the context of the Helios project, are working on refining existing
ontologies to describe bugs from the most used bugtrackers in open source software. We
propose two prototypes for review, based on triplify and EvoOnt BOM, which export
bugs from bugzilla installations and Debian’s UDD in the form of RDF triples.

Read the rest in “Bugtrackers triplification” (PDF)

 

From the launching of the community website codendi.org at the beginning of June, more than 10 000 downloads were made. We take the opportunity to thank all of you who decided to discover Codendi with this way.

 

Today, we invite you to be active and to participate to Codendi Labs. Whether you are student, engineer, architect or project leader, you can bring your knowledge.

 

WHY BECOME A TOP CONTRIBUTOR ?

•  Build your credibility in your areas of expertise

•  Boost your reputation in taking part in an open-source project

•  Increase your visibility in remaining active

 

Top Contributors will be the members who participate the more in the community animation. To reward tham, they’ll become recognized and regularly presented on the community website as well as in the newsletters.

 

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE ?

First of all, you have to create a new account to become member of the community. Thus you’ll be able : 

  • Share the environment on which you downloaded Codendi

  • Ask your questions and find answers in the forums

  • Submit bugs you identified

 • Bring your technical skills: provide a corrective patch or propose your own plugin.

 

The more you contribute  the more you’ll increase your chances to become a Top Contributor. It’s your turn to play !

 

For the needs of the Helios project, I’ve written a script which uses htmldoc to convert the multi-framed HTML documentation as generated by Protege’s OWLDoc plugin to a single HTML document.

Example : the Helios_BT ontology documentation generated by OWLDoc, and the result in one single HTML document.

The Python script is at : owldoc2htmldoc.py (see also the README).

Codendi is ranked number ONE in the “Top 10 Open Source Web-Based Project Management Software” of nixCraft site.  NixCraft website is a very famous site which offers Linux tips, hacks, news, tutorials, guides and ideas in blog format. The main aim is to document the hurdles that most of administrators face as UNIX/Linux/BSD system admin in our day today life. NixCraft is created and maintained by Vivek Gite, a Senior. UNIX admin.

Several criterias have been checked to provide this ranking :

- Project management software must not just be for managing software based project. It can be used for variety of other tasks too.

- The web-based software must provide tools for planning, organizing and managing resources to achieve project goals and objectives.

- A web-based project management software can be accessed through an intranet or WAN / LAN using a web browser. You don’t have to install any other software on the system.

- The software can be easy of use with access control features (multi-user).

We would like to thank NixCraft for this Top 10  and for selecting Codendi as number one.

Full article : NixCraft site

I’ve blogged often about our efforts around RDF and UDD in recent times.

This time, we have used triplify to export contents of some tables of the Debian UDD database to provide information about Debian bugs facts as RDF feeds (using our ontology based on EvoOnt BOM).

More details at : https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/TriplifyUddToRdf including a link to the demonstration server.

 

Date : Mardi 25 Aout

Horaire : de 10h à 11h

 

En 1 heure, depuis votre bureau, découvrez la plateforme Codendi 4.0, solution collaborative open-source de gestion de projets logiciels. En assistant à ce webinaire en ligne, vous découvrirez la panoplie d’outils de Codendi pour les équipes de développements : gestionnaire de tâches, d’anomalies, de documents, de tests, outils de communication et de collaboration ainsi que les services de maintenance et de développement.

 

Vos objectifs :

·      Implémenter un outil unique pour le développement et la gestion de projet

·      Normaliser vos développements

·      Augmenter la productivité de vos équipes (locales ou distribuées)

·      Optimiser le pilotage de vos projets

·      Gagner en maintenabilité, évolutivité et pérennité

·      Mettre en œuvre les méthodologies agiles, CMMI…

 

Agenda:

·      présentation des différents outils de la plateforme

·      navigation dans un projet de démonstration

·      présentation la souscription Pro Services

 

Pendant le webinaire vous pourrez poser toutes vos questions. A l’issue, vous pourrez obtenir un login et mot de passe pour naviguer par vous-même dans la plateforme Codendi.

 

INSCRIPTION GRATUITE EN LIGNE

 

Qu’est-ce qu’un Webinaire ?

Un Webinaire est un séminaire en ligne, c’est-à-dire une présentation réalisée à travers Internet. Sans quitter votre bureau, à travers un navigateur Web et depuis votre poste de travail, vous assistez à une présentation et une démonstration… Une utilisation efficace de votre temps sans vous déplacer ! De quoi avez-vous besoin pour pouvoir suivre un webinaire ? > d’une connexion Internet haut débit et d’une ligne téléphonique.

 

  

Après le webinaire, revenez sur le blog et partagez vos premières impressions.

 

 

Welcome to this month's FusionForge news batch.

I did a presentation of FusionForge at the Libre Software Meeting (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, in French) earlier this month, to explain where we come from and where we hope to go. Many people attended despite the talk being early on the morning following the formal dinner, and the questions showed interest, which is encouraging for the project as a whole. I don't think the talk has been recorded, but the summary and slides are available on the RMLL website.

The big news, though, is that I'm currently at the Debian Conference, Debconf, and that I also attended Debcamp before that. Debcamp is a very productive get-together of developers from all across Debian, and I took the opportunity to get help from them. I spent the first few days refactoring some of the code that was duplicated between the CVS and Subversion plugins, and the result is that version control plugins are now much easier to implement. Case in point: I managed to get the attention of a few users of other tools, and since they only had to implement small specific parts, we now have almost complete plugins for Bazaar, Darcs and Git, and Mercurial will probably follow. CPOLD was done too, but mostly as a proof of concept. If you're around, come and see me, we'll finish the support for your favourite tool together. Or even start it (I haven't started on Arch and Monotone for lack of perceived interest, but I'm quite open to these tools too). In both cases, I promise it won't take long.

This code currently only lives on a temporary branch based off FusionForge 4.8, but I'll port that to trunk and commit it in the coming weeks.

In the “Development” track of the recent LSM/RMLL 2009, we (Stephane Laurière and me) have presented two related speeches, about the use of Semantic Web technology in the frame of Open Source projects development.

Stéphane presented SWIM : Semantic Web enabled Issue Manager, which presents an integration of Semantic Web techniques in the Mandriva community support site, and on the desktop. It’s based on results of projects Nepomuk, Helios and Scribo.

I have also presented Tracking bugs on the (Semantic) Web, which explores the use of Semantic Web techniques (RDF) as a mean to render bugtrackers interoperable, to be able to track bugs to the scale of the whole Semantic Web. This is also based on the work we do in the frame of the Helios project.

Enjoy the slides attached to the linked pages above.

With our help (in the frame of our work on Mantis in the Helios project), the version in Debian testing of Mantis is now in sync with upstream (1.1.8) : http://packages.qa.debian.org/m/mantis/news/20090709T163923Z.html

Next steps, integrate Mantis in the Helios platform for real… and maybe more contributions in Mantis, and maybe on the Mandriva packaging of it. Stay tuned.

Malgré tous nos efforts pour faire de chaque développement logiciel en entreprise un succès, certains projets restent maudits depuis leur commencement. Le site Développez.com dont cet article est un extrait, nous propose 25 signes ou expériences réellement vécues en entreprises et qui annoncent qu’un projet de développement logiciel va être complexe à mener et a des risques de ne pas aboutir.

Voici quelques signaux qui doivent vous alerter:

- Le projet change de nom pour la troisième fois en autant de mois.

- Le chef de projet décide qu’il vaut mieux écrire une version séparée du logiciel pour les Etats-Unis plutôt que d’internationaliser une version unique.

- Les spécifications ont commencé quatre mois après le début du développement.

- Le nouveau directeur de R&D informe fièrement les dirigeants que le projet sera fini à 99% en avance sur le planning et leur assure que le logiciel peut-être livré directement aux clients sans avoir besoin de phases de tests.

- Vous êtes un développeur web. Vous ouvrez l’archive ZIP qui contient les fichiers HTML produits par votre client pour le site que vous intégrez à votre application web. Vous découvrez que les documents HTML du client sont simplement des fichiers Microsoft Word sauvegardés au format HTML.

- Le mémo dit que vous allez développer une application 64 bits sur une plateforme 16 bits.

- Le développeur ne comprend pas le document de spécifications et continue de coder malgré tout. Et l’équipe de validation ne sait pas comment réaliser ses tests mais “teste” malgré tout.

- Quand vous voyez le budget du projet, vous réalisez que plus de la moitié a été dépensée pour demander à un infographiste de créer une maquette de la page d’accueil du site, sans même s’assurer que le design était réalisable. Ou sans aucune considération pour les milliers de pages de contenus qui existeront en plus de cette page d’accueil.

- L’utilisateur ou le client demandent de nouvelles fonctionnalités au lieu de se focaliser sur la résolution de bugs et l’amélioration des performances.

- Vous trouvez une liste de 16 bonnes pratiques de développement et réalisez qu’aucune d’entre elles n’est suivie.

- Les rapports d’avancement sont vus comme une insubordination.

- Le nouveau dirigeant remplace toutes les personnes ayant une connaissance profonde de l’organisation par des externes de son ancienne société.

- C’est un gros projet et son nom est Projet Iceberg. Ou alors c’est la troisième fois que la société essaye de l’arrêter et le projet porte le nom de code Phoénix. Etrangement, vous ne croyez pas que celui ci renaîtra de ses cendres.

- Même les clients qui ont eu la version gratuite sont énervés.

- Le manager de votre projet critique (rapportant 80% des revenus de votre société) a appris la technologie choisie depuis moins de trois mois et il forme 4 nouveaux développeurs en même temps. Le manager a eu droit a une durée de trois mois pour réaliser le projet.

- Ils ont changé le chef de projet et relocalisé le projet entier dans une autre ville. (Vous vous considérez comme chanceux que les deux villes soient sur le même continent.)

- Le chef de projet décide d’appliquer la méthode Agile pour “gagner du temps”.

 

La suite sur le site Développez.com

 

Alors, si lors de votre projet logiciel vous repérez des signaux qui ressemblent à ceux énoncés ici, réunissez votre équipe, prenez du recul par rapport à la situation et mettez en place des mesures pragmatiques en fonction des résultats effectifs que vous souhaitez obtenir.

 

Si vous avez vécu des expériences similaires, faites-nous part de votre histoire et expliquez-nous comment vous avez fait pour sauver votre projet.

With our contribution in the frame of the Helios project, the recently uploaded Mantis Debian package is back up-to-date (1.1.8), and includes again the SOAP interface.

More details in Mantis overview in the PTS.

… well, at least on my machine

The goal is to be able to track remote bugs with bts-link even for your own list of (private) bugs that are not in debbugs (see also prevous post about this idea we work on in the Helios project).

Now, I have some bugs in Mantis, and I add a snippet like the following into one of its notes :
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
*** end bts-link-mantis ***


And starting from that point, bts-link is able to monitor the (remote) Debian bug it refers to, and notify people subscribed to the local Mantis bug.

When running and if the Debian bug status changes, it will add (via SOAP) another note with, for instance :

This is a note generated by bts-link :
remote status report for 0000029
* http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
* remote status changed: (?) -> pending
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
User-Tags: status-pending
*** end bts-link-mantis ***


The same principle would work with almost any bugtracker even if they don’t support forwarded-to tags or any similar remote bug tracking mechanism natively.

The code is here (git), for the curious ones.

EDIT 2009/07/03 : I announced this to the Mantis-dev list hoping there will be some feedback.

Quick heads-up about FusionForge. The main news of course is that 4.8 has been released upstream (and uploaded to Debian experimental). We'll keep fixing major bugs on that branch of course, but our focus is now on trunk.

We're finding it tedious to deal with legacy code, so one of the goals we have now is to clean up the codebase to bring it more in line with good practice. That's going to take some time, though, because there's lots of code. Some of that code, however, seems unused (it's been broken for some time without anyone complaining), so it's likely that we'll deprecate and/or remove bits of code unless someone steps forward to maintain it (or at least bring it into shape). In particular, we're looking at the MySQL support (which hasn't been maintained for years) and some of the old visual themes which are going to require some work to keep working with some changes we're planning in the way the pages are displayed.

This should make maintenance easier for the implementation or integration of new features down the line. Which will be the subject of a future post, when a currently undercover French Forge Cabal actually starts producing concrete results. Watch this space.