We're excited about the dependencies in Asana (https://asana.com/guide/help/tasks/dependencies), however can't figure out how to access dependencies using the API. It appears that marking a task as dependent on another task is only via the GUI. Is that possible?
Unfortunately, we don't have dependency management in our API at this point. We are always evaluating when the best time to implement these sorts of features are, though, so thanks for reaching out - I've recorded this question as another vote for dependency management. Although I don't have a concrete timetable for when we might get to this, we have identified it as a good opportunity to work on within the next few months, so hopefully you'll see dependency support happen sooner rather than later!
Related
I am curious if it is possible to automatically measure whether a test suite is flaky from the Circle CI interface. I would measure flaky as - fail and pass with a re-trigger. Is this possible to easily do?
Not at the moment, as far as I'm aware. I've done an extensive research on build insights in general, which included flaky tests analysis and monitoring, and finally decided to build my own tool. The good news is that last I checked, they seem to be focusing on creating better insights tools in addition to what they currently have. They'll tell you all about it if you reach out to them.
In the interim, you have a few options:
Ask them how far away are they from supporting for your idea of what a flaky is (I'm hoping this point gets outdated shortly as they work on it)
Consume their data through their decent enough API, and build your own tool in the interim and crunch the numbers yourself (this is what I ended up doing and it isn't too bad)
For example: generally speaking, a flaky for my team is a test that failed more than a few times over a large timespan. Their API gives you whether a build failed or not, which test failed, when and how. This gave me enough to work with and figure out whether I consider that spec failure as flaky or not. I'd assume yours is sort of similar, with maybe the only difference being whether it was re-triggered (unsure if they provide that info specifically, but you could refer to the workflow, commit and build ID to figure that out; e.g. if the build ID of a new run is the same).
With that beind said, the "how easy is it?" part of your question is something I can't really say for certain. It was a relatively easy learning curve to go through their APIs, get familiar with it, run a couple of requests, look at the data, massage it, store in the DB, then build a web interface around it. But I'm not sure how much familiarity and experience the people building the tool on your end have.
So our Company just started using Jira, and i've created a new "Issue" type for Test Plans.
However I'm sorta running into the problem of that when creating a "session" in Jira (Capture for instance) that test plans and actual bugs are all kinda under the same thing.
It seems to me that Jira was never meant to really be used to store test plans, am I missing something? I've looked at the Jira guides to make it work for keeping test plans, but it just seems so convoluted and overly complex that it seems like another TCM tool makes more sense.
Has anyone else ran into this? Am I missing a better way to do TCM with Jira?
Thank
JIRA is a ticketing system.
As it's marketing buzzword bingo says: "Issue tracking and code integration to plan, collaborate, and ship great products." It does more if you find or create the necessary plugins.
It does issue tracking by itself, and code integration with other Atlassian platforms.
It does not do test management.
There are plugins for that (like Zephyr) by third parties, but in general, I don't recommend mixing test case management with issue tracking. Make your separate TCM tool to create a ticket in your separate ticketing system.
So I've been tasked at work to write windows services to replace some old legacy VB6 WinForms apps currently running as services, consistently repeating tasks day-to-day. To give some general background, they have there own state machines built in to handle decision basing and not utilizing threading.
A lot of the senior developers here thought it would be worth a try to look into WorkFlow to replace the state machines rather than write my own business logic and try threading it programmaticly. So it's WF vs. the "Old College Try" I suppose.
My concern is that there aren't many books on the topic, and since it was implemented in .Net I've heard very little about it being used. I brought this up at work and another developer mentioned that it's because Biz Talk never really caught on and it was designed for that.
So is it broken? Do you think it will be supported long enough to not worry so much? I don't want an ill-functioning process injected into my services, my new babies at work, and then have WF's keel over. Leaving me with having to replace them with my own code in the event of an emergency; which does not seem like much of a grand scenario to me.
Any suggestions, recommendations would be super.
Workflow Foundation is used in Microsoft SharePoint, so I think they will continue supporting it.
There is an open source project called Stateless by Nicholas Blumhardt. It is quite flexible and very light weight. See my SO answer for details.
I chose this over Windows Workflow simply because I could define a state as State and thereby persist the state of my workflows back to the database using SubSonic. Configuration consists of one XML file. If I need to add tasks, I simply add nodes to the XML.
The each state can have a series of triggers that once satisfied will advance to appropriate state. This framework is a single assemble and fits nicely in your domain logic.
Clarification/summary for the question -- we're looking for:
a hosted bug tracking system,
that is as convenient to use as lighthouse/github/launchpad,
can deal with attachments,
integrates email notifications and operations (implies operations in commit messages),
has a script-friendly API,
allows anonymous bug reports, or ones with an email but that do not require setting up an account for submission.
Lighthouse is close but fails on the last point, launchpad is similar, github also doesn't handle attachments. Tender is great for the last point, but fails as a general bug tracking system (and it looks like its open-source version will be limited to basically being a forum).
We looked into a number of applications to install and setup -- but with this range of requirements, they are always coming with a huge cost in terms of investing time in setting up and maintaining a working system.
In our (open-source) project we have been using Gnats for a really long time. It doing what it was designed to do fine, but that's getting to be pretty inconvenient: it's no longer maintained, has features that we never use, and lack features that we'd want to use... It doesn't deal with attachments, has no easy way to perform actions via emails, no integration with commit messages, and a web interface that was designed for 90s browsers. So I've been looking around in an attempt to find something that could replace it, hopefully some hosted solution to avoid the setup/maintenance hassle.
Probably the most impressive tool that I've seen is lighthouse: it has a very nice and practical interface, properly deals with attachments, controllable via emails, and can respond to commands in commit messages. But... It doesn't have any sane way to submit a bug anonymously -- and that's a major requirement, since we need any random user to be able to submit bugs through our IDE. (It seems that there is a possible hack to forward an email faking the From field, but that doesn't work very well -- specifically, the reporter should be included in the followup email exchange.) On the other side, there is the related tender tool, which is very good in that area, but is very basic otherwise -- too basic to serve as a bug tracking system.
There's a whole bunch of other sites that I've tried -- it seems that all of them require submitters to have an account, so they don't work well for our needs; as well as being limited in various other ways (don't deal with attachments, no good email integration, etc etc). It doesn't help that the meta-descriptions of these sites is usually pretty obscure: it took me hours to just figure out what tender/lighthouse are and how they're related, and no site mentions its inability to receive bug reports without registration. (I'm looking only at open-source-friendly sites, since we don't have any kind of budget for such things.)
There's also the option of installing some system locally, but bug tracking systems tend to be monsters that I'd like to avoid configuring and maintaining, if possible.
So the question is: is there anything obvious that I'm missing? Or to make it more concrete: is there a good comparison page somewhere that lays out popular options and their respective features explicitly?
JIRA is free for open source projects. It's far more user friendly than trac and bugzilla, and allows anonymous submissions and plugins. Unfortunately you'll need to host it on your own server, but from personal experience I can tell you that all you need to do is install a database (it can run without; but that's not a good idea) and it basically maintains itself.
Also is there a particular reason why Google Code or Sourceforge issue tracking tools wouldn't work? You don't need to use all their services if you don't want, you could use them purely for issue tracking.
Did you try trac? It is used by many open source projects.
FogBugz is one option. They'll host or you can run it yourself. My company looked at it but ... political considerations ... meant it is not viable here.
Have you looked at this Comparison of issue tracking systems on Wikipedia?
I have also found fixx, by hedgehoglab. Apparently it has the features that you care more:
Get things done
fixx has an intuitive interface to enable quick bug
reporting. Filling in a bug report is
as easy as sending e-mail.
Ability to add multiple attachments to issues allowing you
to attach screenshots and manage
documents related to issues.
Clever notification options to keep relevant people informed while
preventing issue tracker spam.
Also:
It has an open REST API.
I see that you are using Subversion as SCM. There is a Subversion integration with fixx.
Its unique installation requirement is Sun JDK 1.5.0.
It seems free for Open Source Projects and an hosted version is "Coming soon".
Note that I have never used it, so I cannot give any recommendation.
The open source BugTracker.NET has support for the following areas that are giving you problems:
Attachments
Guest login
Email notifications
SVN commit integration
I found it easy to set up, maintain, and tweak. Of course, you might think otherwise if you are not familiar with .NET and have a Windows server available.
You might look at Unfuddle. They do allow an API for the submission of tickets and have your other points covered including attachments.
Take a look at repositoryhosting.com They have ready made solution with trac / svn / git, for you. Comes with all kinds of bells and whitsles, such as Agilo plug-in and auotomatic backup to the amazon S3 bucket of your choice.
The prices are very reasonable.
Also, jumboxes offers a Trac / SVN virtual appliance that you can host in your own environment.
Redmine is a good open source option. You can check an online demo and a list of features.
It's not hosted though. But it's an interesting option.
And you can always check a list of different open source bug tracking alternatives
I've used ZenDesk in the past and it was rather hassle free.
In addition it has an api: http://www.zendesk.com/api.
Moreover I KNOW it can CC whosoever you want it to whenever anything happens.
We too are looking for a new solution.
At present we're using FogBugz, which is painfully slow.
We need our customers to be able to log bugs via email. Tender looks perfect, with the exception that it doesn't have any obviously usable ID fields that we can pass around. Is there a plugin or similar? I could knock up a browser extension to "goto bug id [whatever]" but that seems kludgy for what should surely be a core feature?
What behavior have you had to implement in your Rails applications that you feel could exist nicely as a plugin?
What plugin functionality have you searched for in the past but couldn't find?
What existing Rails plugins could be improved or extended, and how?
I'd like to see an engines plugin that dropped in an admin interface that provided a dashboard summary of all the models in the app, with configurable activity charts.
I once wrote a component for an application that did uploaded a zip of photos to an application so they didn't have to be done one by one, I think I may make that into a plugin when I have time, well a new version of it, the code's a little ugly.
Not easy to answer. Everyone is biased towards his own current projects. Additionally a lot of great plugins already exists.
Personally I would like to see some menu plugin for a typical data base application. E.g. where there are few user roles, and every user role has different rights. And a main menu with sub menu which depends on user's rights to actions.
A (CSS) menu is reimplemented in almost every data base application. It is rather given application specific thing and I don't know how hard it would be to implement some general solution or template.
A Credit Card Payment System
Right now, no one bothers implementing credit card payments until a site has become "production quality". Single-person projects or small startups don't bother making this at first b/c they would much rather spend their time prototyping new, hard, or interesting features.
This is bad in the long-run for everyone, including end-users, b/c the default is to offer (often innovative and really great) services for free, which means only already-funded teams or people with lots of extra time can even get to the point of making something.
If this existed, were packaged up neatly, and were as dead-simple as Rails scaffolding, small projects could default to whatever payment scheme that actually made sense -- like pay-per-use, donations, trial periods, first 5 free, etc. -- making it possible to fund the really great products out there, instead of forcing them to rely on outside funding or ads, which ruins the product.
In a real physical store, people expect to pay. If the person on the other side of the counter gives me something for free (w/o buying anything at all), I say "Are you serious??" and walk away bewildered. But online, I almost expect it. This is bad! Because now everyone expects it, and people trying to make great things can't focus on actually doing that b/c they are too busy trying to figure out how to make it great and free.
Oftentimes, there are free things out there online that I like so much that I would like to pay for, but there's simply no easy way to do it. And I'm not alone. I use tipjoy and have donated to things that have a PayPal donation setup like Auditorium, but I don't see these as adequate.
The best thing out there that I've seen is RailsKits. But as far as I understand, they aren't packaged properly so that I can add them to my site whenever I please like a plugin or gem.
I'd like to see some sort of in-built video playback/streaming. I need it for my current project.
I agree with Greg... there are lots of great plugins, and lots of great ideas for more.
I think there's always a need for more web APIs to be supported. As we go forward with API driven services and semantic web, there's tons of work to be done on that front.
http://www.programmableweb.com/ is a great starting point for thinking about what really useful APIs don't have a rails plugin or ruby gem yet.
Cheers!
Walt