agile42: What about agilo without Trac?

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May 29

What about agilo without Trac?

Posted by: andreat

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Currently 0/5

It's quite some times that we are thinking about a lot of new features we could introduce in Agilo, but most of the time we just incur in some Trac "limitations" and we just get frustrated...

Do not misunderstand me, fact is Trac has been build to do some generic and very easy to use Ticket tracking and management, what we are doing with Agilo is to try to support a specific Process, that needs a bit more of infrastructure, rules, support. We are now porting Agilo to Trac 0.11 and thanks to Edgewall guys, they really made some great improvement there... but still some things are just not fitting in :-(

First thought we had is to build a completely new User interface on and use Trac as a backend to store and retrive information, fact is that Agilo alters quite a bit also the "normal" Business Logic of Trac, and this is making the development of the product not so easy, but gives you as user the advantage to use additional plugins, or hacks :-)

On the other side, if we would have full control and the possibility of build our own Model we would surely be able to improve usability, without giving up on limitations, and probably achieve more attractive performance, optimizing the data management in the way Agilo needs without having to withstand the existing Models.

So, you are the users... what do you think? How much is it important that Agilo is based on Trac?

Thanks for Contributing, your opinion matters!

Best ANdreaT

Related tags: agilo, community, scrum, tool

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Comments

#1 On June 18, 2008 at 21:06.30, FSchwarz commented:

danielwt: Generally you should be able to use Agilo with trac/MySQL if you really need it. Did you have any special problems with MySQL?

Please note that we do not recommend MySQL as the trac docu has some warnings about it ("Use this only if you don't have other choice, and be warned that there can be many issues,").

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#2 On June 18, 2008 at 14:06.16, danielwt commented:

I considered Agilo as "Agile Tool", but i need that works on Mysql cause our trac installation. :(

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#3 On June 18, 2008 at 01:06.38, andreat commented:

In the effort to try to contribute more to Trac community, I have opened today a Project on Trac Hacks (http://www.trac-hacks.org/) let's see what happend.

We will also try to contribute more to the trac-dev group, it's a promise ;-)

Best ANdreaT

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#4 On June 12, 2008 at 08:06.30, andreat commented:

Thank you everybody, your feedback is greatly appreciated, we are developing Agilo for Scrum 0.7 on Trac 0.11, and at the moment there is no real "Plan" to swap from Trac.

We will probably implement a "new" User Interface, to maximize productivity with agilo, not suer yet how this will affect the rest of the trac interface/plugins.

Unfortunately, we can't do so much if there are some plugins out there that are working only with one DB type. We are investing quite some time in keeping Agilo working with PostgreSQL and SQLite, unfortunately with MySQL we have some problems, some times, that we are not really able to scope.

For the 0.7 development we setup a continuous integration server, and a lot more of unittests, fact is that still your feedback and help is mostly needed, we will never be able to test all multiple combinations of environments... it's a fact ;-)

Thanks for contributing!

More update soon to come...

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#5 On June 8, 2008 at 14:06.22, perda1 commented:

Keep it integrated with Trac. There are so many nice plugins and other stuff in Trac that we one will miss.

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#6 On June 7, 2008 at 15:06.11, gamebhai commented:

I've been working with agilo42 for not too long. I was assigned make the plugin work for Trac. It gave me really hard time to install it. When it was done, I found out that I can't edit the burndown table. I had to select the tickets individually and then edit them. It was really frustrating and I really didn't know what to do. Thanks to ANdreaT he told me to test it with PostgreSQL. When I did that everything was ok. Later I found out that Trac integration with MySQL was experimental.

On the other hand there are some Trac plugin which you can not use. So often people ask which plugin is more important. For example there is Peer Review plugin which doesn't work with PostgreSQL :(

For us, we are using Trac only for the Scrum capability of agilo42. Otherwise we wouldn't have used Trac.

If you really want to release agilo42 separately please do include the following features.

LDAP Support. I use apache to do it now. Make sure it is there or agilo42 supports it in some other way. This is very very important for us.
A nice bug tracker that supports test cases. See RTH from sourceforge for details. [Treat as plugin]
All the support that Trac provides by default that is Wiki, Report, Roadmap.
Inclusion of support like code review will be really appreciated. [Treat as plugin]
Integration with Subversion. [Treat as plugin]
A cross platform [Windows, Linux, Mac] GUI client. This may sounds crazy but believe me it will solve lots of performance issues. See Gnome Planner for example.[Optional]

I've mentioned bug tracking, code review and integration with subversion as plugin so that when people install this software they will not think that this is some software that is being used by developers only. So you will gain a greater market for your product.

I'd vote for Agilo without Trac if I get the all the features I mentioned above. I know it will solve a lots of issues and emails to come for your next release.

Best Regards Dewan Shamsul Alam

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#7 On June 2, 2008 at 17:06.35, hobbes commented:

Hello,

I can't say much about the Scrum process and your workflow problems, since we havn't used it so far. But the following jumps into my mind when reading your blog:

What I'm missing is some efforts of backporting your achievements back into trac or even that you mention your plugins at track hacks. I know that the trac team is very "close" to enhancements (and there are always long discussion on their list about this fact). And I know also that any integration question will have to stand long discussions before someone will finally succeed or fail which can be a very frustrating. But I have not read any email from you about agile42 on trac-dev or trac. The only mentioning of agile42 is a short thread that summarizes as: "Given they don't seem to know Trac isn't an acronym, I would avoid them."

But as long as sombody will propose interfaces, there should be a reasonable chance to get this merged into trac.

Additionally there are some plugins at trac hacks that do similar things of what you did with agile42, e.g hiding of ticket fields. Why not reuse/enhance these hacks.

What I like to see as a general trac enhancement is the ability to provide the tabular interfaces to the ticket system, e.g. I could dream of a new tab that will list all related checkins with the current ticket number, and naturally the possibility to change multiple tickets in one go.

And I really think you will get a lot of attention, if you try to integrate these little things and then ask for more.

You have at least my vote for it, even if it doens't count on trac-dev ;-)

Best regards Dirk

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What about agilo without Trac?

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