Codesion Blog

You Ask, We Answer! 10 Commonly Asked Questions...

hrmpw — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:01:33 -0800

Here at Codesion our customers come from a variety of backgrounds. We have expert users that have been running CVS for years, we have Subversion users that have been using it since it was first introduced, we have users that are transitioning from Subversion to Git, and we have many new users that have never used version control With so many levels of expertise, the questions we see on a daily basis run the gamut. Here is a sampling of some of the more recent questions and answers.

Q: What types of files can you store? (e.g. video, files, HTML, .NET, etc..)

A: In short, everything. Any files that you want to version or work on collaboratively can be stored in Codesion. Subversion and Git are file-type agnostic so you can work with text-based source files or with binary files (graphics, videos, etc). If you have a client that can interface with SVN or Git you can work with any files. Click here to read a great blog article discussing how people are using Subversion as version control and storage for many things other than just source code.

Q: What type of backup support does Codesion offer?

A: Our backup system is designed on the philosophy that the customer always owns their data. We make sure their data is always available, secure, and backed up but we also make all of those backups available to our customers.

You can read more about our backup procedure here. We do a hot backup to a dedicated server every 10 minutes, a cold backup to a dedicated datacenter every 24 hours, and we maintain an archive of those cold backups for 30 days; 10/24/30. The likelihood of data loss is very, very slim.

Once we have those backups, we don’t just sit on them, we make them fully available to our Business Plan customers both on demand and through a push mechanism. Customers can go to the Backup tab in their dashboard and either download their backups directly from there or schedule a service for us to push their backups to them via svnsync, rsync, ftp, sftp, or WebDAV. Customers always have the option of maintaining their own data backups.

Q: I need my issue tracker to interface with my source management. I don’t want to be in one application and then have to go to another application to log a fix. How can I do this?

A: Ticket integration is one of the most popular features in Codesion. The Codesion community article describing how to link your repository to your issue tracker is consistently one of the most viewed articles on our site. All commits into SVN, Git, and CVS can update tickets in any of our hosted products: TeamForge, Scrumworks Pro, Bugzilla, and Trac. We also support ticket integrations into third-party issue trackers such as Basecamp, Jira, Rally, VersionOne, etc.

Q: How can I setup RBAC (role based access control) on Git like I can on subversion?

A: One of the great features of Subversion is the ability to apply very specific user roles to different directories. For example, you can give a specific team R/W access to a particular branch in the project but no access or read-only to other branches or the trunk. This gives the project administrator full control of their repositories.

Git, on the other hand, is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) and it is meant to be shared. Whenever I think about the Git sharing model I can’t help but think of the lyrics from “Games without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel:

Hans clones from Lotte, Lotte clones from Jane
Jane pushes to Willie, Willie is happy again.

Git is great for moving code from remote to remote but it doesn’t support the same centralized access model that Subversion will. With so many clones and branches in different locations, how do you manage one repository that is used for builds and deployment? How do you make it so only a few select people can merge changes into the repository?

VP of Engineering Willie Wang, wrote a blog article about the need for a canonical, blessed repository in Git. This repository is used for all new clones (canonical) and for builds (blessed). Within Codesion, each Git repository can be kept in a different Project. Within the Security settings only specific users or roles are granted full R/W access to the blessed repository. Other users can be given read access so they can clone the repository but they cannot push any changes back into it. Users without write access to the blessed repository can work within separate Codesion projects with clones of the repository. The owner of the blessed repository can then manage which branches to merge back to the blessed repository. This Git push from one project to another can now be done from the Codesion Publisher as well.

Q: Do you report on how issues are being logged? I need to be able to get statistics out of issue tracking to see what programs are causing the most issues or are being updated.

A: TeamForge, Trac, and Bugzilla all have varying levels of Reports that can show where the most issues are being logged. ScrumWorks Pro and TeamForge also have Burndown charts and detailed reports to show how the team is tracking against the Sprint Plan.

TeamForge on Codesion, unlike Trac and Bugzilla, also has visibility across multiple projects so you can monitor all of these projects from a single dashboard.

Q: With remote servers, how do I know my performance will be acceptable?

A: Performance is not solely defined bynetwork speed. It is also contingent upon the resources available, the distribution of the team, and the reliability of the server. Many people moving their SCM into the Cloud are transitioning from a Subversion server under-the-desk or have a distributed team. In the case of the server under-the-desk, Subversion is going to be resource restricted or competing with all other services running on the server. With a distributed team, the users will have to access the repository over HTTP/s and someone will have to manage the firewall access and optimize network bandwidth.

The Codesion Platform is designed from the ground up to be secure, fast and available. We make sure that only you and your users have access to those servers. We make sure that your repositories are run on hardware optimized and dedicated for the service it is running, whether it be Subversion, Git, CVS, TeamForge, etc. Lastly, we make sure our servers are always available with a high-availability infrastructure, full backups and full system monitoring.

Q: Do you have workflow? I need to have management sign off on things moving to production — with notifications to staff who need to know.

A: TeamForge, Trac, and even Bugzilla all have ticket workflows built in and allow for varying levels of customized workflow. TeamForge, for instance, allows the user to create different workflows for each type of artifact tracked in the project. By default, TeamForge includes Trackers for: Defects, Epics, Stories, Tasks, and Tests. Each of these artifact types can have a different workflow and notification process. In addition, users can create their own custom Trackers and apply a new workflow to that Tracker. The level of customization allows for almost any scenario.

Q: What is the difference between SWP and TFP?

A: TeamForge Project (TFP) focuses on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) while ScrumWorks Pro (SWP) focuses on Agile Project Management. Okay, but what does that mean?

Both of them allow you to capture product backlog items (PBIs) and plan Sprints. Both of them allow you to report your Sprint and Release progress with Burndown charts or custom reports. In short, both TFP and SWP are designed to improve the agility of your development team and to increase collaboration. The difference is in what you want to accomplish.

TFP also includes a full wiki for information sharing, document storage and versioning, defect tracking for change control, release management, and integration with Hudson for continuous integration. TeamForge is designed to manage the full lifecycle of your products from inception through sunset. It helps to standardize practices and keep everyone on the team informed so they can perform at an optimal level. Everything the project team needs is in one location.

ScrumWorks Pro on the other hand provides a laser-like focus on the process of Scrum project management. It is meant to let a scrum team practice scrum as efficiently as possible. Product Backlog management is very simple and straightforward while a virtual whiteboard is provided for collaborative task management.

If your goal is to manage all aspects of your development process and begin to standardize across products then TeamForge is probably the better solution. If your goal is to accelerate the adoption of Scrum within your development team or to increase the velocity of an existing Agile team then ScrumWorks Pro is probably the better solution.

Q: Why do you have multiple clients for ScrumWorks Pro (SWP)?

A: SWP has two clients: a Desktop Client and a Web Client. The Desktop Client is a Java Web Start Program that connects to the remote database hosted by Codesion over HTTP. The Web Client is an HTML client that connects to the same remote database hosted by Codesion. They are kept separate based on a division of labor.

The purpose of the Desktop Client is to provide a more robust client to simplify the project management tasks of Scrum. This includes Sprint Team user management, Product Backlog Item (PBI) management, Release and Sprint Planning.

The Web Client is designed as a lightweight client for day-to-day sprint team activities: task creation, task board, impediment tracking, and Burndown reporting.

The goal should be to have your Product Owner and ScrumMaster work within the Desktop Client, while the rest of the sprint team only has to operate in the Web Client.

Q: When should I use Git or SVN for my project?

A: Git versus Subversion has become a hot topic and many people have strong opinions one way or another. Many developers like the ease of use and flexibility of Git while others like the centralized control of Subversion. For us, the answer is simple: use whatever one makes you happy. I highly recommend reading this blog which provides a detailed viewpoint of the strengths and weakness of each between both version control systems.

Subversion or Git? Decisions, decisions ….

jrepenning — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:42:00 -0800

Are you facing a difficult choice between version control systems? Are you having trouble sorting out the alternatives? Are you bewildered by all the opinions you find on Google? Let’s see if I can help sort this all out.

CollabNet (the original stewards of the Subversion project) provides both Subversion and Git, either through our enterprise TeamForge product or through our Codesion Cloud Services. We think there’s a place in the universe for each. Here’s how to find yourself in that universe.

The short form

Here are some specific recommendations. If you want to stop reading at the end of this section, you should make out just fine.

If you have compelling requirements for a single, certain, master copy of your work, use Subversion. You can do this with Git, so long as there are no slip-ups. But you can’t do anything else with Subversion (slip-ups or no), and “compelling requirements” like Sarbanes-Oxley are happier with guarantees than possibilities.

If you plan to maintain parallel, largely shared but permanently somewhat different lines of the same product, use Git. One common example: perhaps you have a large product that you customize for each customer. The customizations are permanent, and generally not shared among code lines, but most of the code is common to all. Git was designed for just this case (in Git terms, local customizations to the common core, and occasional feature or bug-fix contributions back up-tree).

Neither of those? Take your pick, you should be fine with either tool.

The Basics

What do you want from your version control system? A lot of this is the same for everyone, and both tools accomplish these tasks just fine. If all you care about is the basics, you could easily just flip a coin and get on with your work, confident that your choice would be sound. These “basics” include:

Store all versions of your files (“version control”)
Associate versions of each file with appropriate versions of all other files (“configuration management”)
Allow many people to work on the same files, toward a common goal or release (“concurrency”)
Allow groups of people to work on substantially the same files, but each group towards its own goal or release (“branching”)
Recover, at any time, a coherent configuration of file versions that correspond to some goal or release, either for investigation or extension like bug fixing (“release management”)

Both systems do all these things quite well. If these things are truly all you care about … flip that coin! All the discussion and decision has to do with other details, details that are always secondary to the basics, but can become crucial to particular projects or environments.

So, if you haven’t flipped that coin and gone away, let’s look at the differences.

But first, some demythologization

Here are a few things you may have heard that just aren’t true, or aren’t true any longer:

~~Git hates windows~~. No, it doesn’t. It used to, but now there are good Git integrations with Windows Explorer (TortoiseGIT, SmartGIT) and most of the major IDEs (Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans), and you no longer need to use the Unix emulation environment Cygwin.

~~Git is only for hackers~~. As a Unix-centric, command-line only tool, Git was originally anathema for many workers. But with all the GUI integrations, it’s considerably more friendly, within reach of nearly everyone (see Windows integrations above, plus non-Windows tools like GitX, Coda via GitX or Tower, Emacs).

~~Git is hard to learn~~. Well, it’s a lot easier to learn now, anyway, thanks to those GUIs, and to improvements in the command-line UI and documentation.

On the other hand

~~Subversion is slow on Windows~~. The latest Subversion releases, up to the current 1.7, have made great strides in Windows performance.

~~Subversion merging is hard~~. Well, it’s a lot easier now, anyway, thanks to the continuing progress on “merge tracking.”

So, what’s different?

As you’ve surely heard, the key difference is that Subversion is “centralized,” while Git is “distributed.” You can go many other places to learn about what that means in their implementation, I don’t spend time on that here. But I will talk about why it matters to you.

Local versioning

Git’s distributed model means that you have full version control operations purely locally on your workstation. Of course, the changes you make locally are not visible to anyone else, until you do something else (Git’s “push” or “pull”), but you can check changes in so they’re not lost, create branches, merge among branches, back up to older versions, and browse and compare versions — all without a network. The one cost in all that is, you have to learn some additional commands (push, pull, clone) and workflows, if you ever expect anyone else to see your work. You can do everything locally that any version control system can do … and you also have extra steps required to make your work visible to others, kind of an inescapable trade-off. On balance, local versioning is a significant convenience for the developer, and a big part of the popularity of Git.

Guaranteed centralization

Most processes have some reason to want one copy of everything, somewhere, that’s reliably known to be “the official version.” With Subversion, that’s the central repository. With Git, that’s … some repository or other: the tool doesn’t privilege any one repository over another, but users and conventions can. With Git, you have to remember to push or pull all changes into the designated central repository — not hard to remember, especially if you support it with other conventions, such as only building releases from the central, but still an extra step. With Subversion, there’s nothing to remember or agree to: there is only one repository. By definition, anything that’s checked in at all is checked in to the central. One place where this can become particularly important is in “governance,” where external constraints like Sarbanes-Oxley or escrow contracts demand hands-off guarantees. On balance, enterprises with governance constraints value the guarantees of Subversion.

(Governance, traceability, ALM, and DevOps all require broader support than just the code and files, of course: there has to be integration among the code repository, the tests, the deployed product, and the tracking system. Fortunately, CollabNet now integrates both Subversion and Git with these other components.)

Throw-away work

Somewhat paradoxically, there are times when you want to throw away (or keep private) some work. Git is better at throwing things away than Subversion is: you keep the potentially throw-away work in its own repository until you decide whether to make it official. If you decide to toss it, there are virtually no left-overs in the repositories you keep. By contrast, in Subversion, everything goes into the one central repository, and you don’t have that same option. Typically in Subversion, you don’t actually “throw away” such work, but only leave it on some branch you never look at. But it’s still there, taking up space, and possibly cluttering the history browser. The possibility of throw-away work is a fairly big consideration in open-source work (and in fact it was one of the key design considerations for Git), but rather less so for enterprise work (where throw-away work is also throw-away salaries, equipment, lighting, and all the other employee expenses), so enterprises typically avoid ever doing it in the first place. I wrote about handling throw-away work at some length a while back.

Un-recommendations

Some things are possible, but I wouldn’t recommend them — at least, not to someone who has to ask:

~~Git-SVN~~. Git is able to pull files out of a Subversion repository, store them in a Git repository (allowing all that local version control, and some inter-git-repository push/pull/merge), and then push the results back into Subversion. It sounds like the best of both worlds, doesn’t it? But you end up having to be an above-average expert in both systems, and parts of the workflow are very slow. Some folks really like it. Maybe you would, too. But it’s not what you’d call “mainstream.”

~~Cygwin.~~ Cygwin is a system for providing a lot of Unix-like capabilities on a Windows system. Early Git Windows implementations ran inside Cygwin. Again, this ends up forcing you to be an above-average expert in two very different systems. If you’re already steeped in Unix and Windows both, it can be handy. But it’s a high price to pay for just adding a little Git. Fortunately, Git Windows installation no longer requires Cygwin.

So, which one’s for you? Try a free, fully functional 30 day trial of Subversion and Git on Codesion to help make this choice.

Collaboration in the Cloud

nbellcollab — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:33:00 -0800

In a recent interview our VP/GM, Guy Marion (@guy_marion), spoke with IT Business Edge blogger, Arthur Cole, on the collaborative nature of the cloud. The flexibility and agility that the cloud provides plus the desire (I would go as far as saying ‘need’) to adopt collaboration and social networking work processes that we have all become to depend on in our personal lives, is driving more enterprises and development teams to push services and infrastructure to the cloud. This however does not come without challenges to the the enterprise though (Security, compliance, visibility etc)

Read the full interview here and what Guy has to say on “Collaboration in the Cloud”

Technical Debt - The High Cost of Future Change

hrmpw — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:59:00 -0800

But little Mouse, you are not alone,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes of mice and men

Go often askew,

And leave us nothing but grief and pain,

For promised joy!

Robert Burns wrote this verse of “To a Mouse” in 1785 and his words are just as true today. Foresight is not a perfect tool so we aren’t capable of creating a perfect plan for the future. Even if we spend months researching there will always be known-knowns, known-unknowns, and unknown-unknowns to account for in our planning.

Things that we know to be true today can always change in the future. Anyone who has finished (or, I should say, started) a software release of any size knows that requirements are not constant. Business needs to constantly adapt to stay current with the marketplace. Business software follows the requirements of the business and must change just as rapidly. Software that forces the business to adapt to it rather than adapting to the business finds its way to shelf quickly.

In addition to ever changing requirements we have to consider the ephemeral nature of technology itself. Will our state-of-the-art technology still be cutting edge by the time we finish? Is the technology stack too old or too young? Too old and it might perform poorly or require expensive refactoring later. Too young and it might be unstable and poorly supported, especially in a partner ecosystem.

Those are just the things we think we know. Most of us who survive high school realize at some point that we don’t know everything. In fact, there is quite a bit that we don’t know – I feel dumber every year. However, even in this great pool of ignorance there are things we know we don’t know. The rest are things we never even considered. On every project I have been part of I have always gone in knowing all the questions I didn’t have answers to yet. Likewise, on every project I have worked on we have come across problems that we never even considered when we started.

As an example, a few years ago I bought a wooden sailboat to rebuild. I researched and I schemed for months on ways to save my nice teak deck. Finally, I decided that I couldn’t save the deck because the plywood substrate was just too rotten; I would have to rebuild the deck.

I knew my budget, I knew my meager carpentry skills, and I knew what I wanted as a finished product. I thought I had an achievable plan. At the same time, I knew that I didn’t fully know the state of the frame under the deck and some of it might have to be rebuilt. What I never considered and didn’t know until I removed the deck was that my steering quadrant was rusted and needed to be completely abraded, rustproofed, and repainted. I also didn’t know that the plywood substrate under my deck extended under my bulwarks (the section of hull that rises above the deck) compounding the rot problem by an order of magnitude.

In this case, my unknown unknowns (the things I didn’t know and never thought to ask) put the project well beyond my time projections. While it’s true that more research and planning up-front might have revealed these problems before I started, it would not have changed the work needed to get the boat ship-shape again and I would have started even later. At this point I was faced with the choice of cutting corners - possibly compromising the future safety of the boat - to get something done before rainy season started or stick with my plan and finish much later than I wanted. I was facing Technical Debt.

While Technical Debt can occur in a boat-rebuilding folly such as mine it is more commonly associated with software development. When we begin a new software project we are typically given a list of feature requirements and a release time frame. This intersection of features and time is usually based on an ideal development project. As the known-knowns change, the known-unknowns crystallize, and the unknown-unknowns manifest the ability of the team to meet the original goals is compromised.

In the case of my boat the debt resulted in a long delay in using it. If I had cut corners to finish the work in one season the cost of future repairs would have been much greater, assuming future changes were even possible. Software development teams don’t have the luxury of delaying a release indefinitely; something has to be shipped. When faced with missed deadlines most software teams go into Technical Debt. The release sometimes takes precedence over good development practices: features are dropped, tests are skipped, and extensibility is sacrificed. The future cost of paying back this Technical Debt through refactoring, creating new features, or updating the technology stack is often overlooked.

Adopting Agile development practices is a great way to combat this mounting Technical Debt. Rather than go into the details I highly recommend watching the webinar hosted by Certified Scrum Trainer Michael James. He chronicles several examples of Technical Debt and discusses how best to use Agile development practices, specifically Scrum, to lessen the occurrence of future debt and incrementally pay back accrued debt.

Another factor in reducing Technical Debt is to make sure that the required tools and the correct tools are always available to everyone on the team. “Mise en place” is a French phrase used in culinary schools that means “everything in place.” Chefs are drilled in the practice of preparing their stations before beginning work so they can quickly deliver high-quality products on a consistent basis.

Agile development teams should approach projects with this same discipline of “mise en place.” Developers don’t need just an IDE; they also need access to collaborative tools such as version control, issue tracking, file storage, and agile management. Having these tools available and ready-to-go when the project starts enables agility. Rather than devoting resources to installing, maintaining, and supporting all of these tools separately more and more teams are turning to the Cloud to properly equip their development team with all of the tools they need.

This is why Agile software development and the Cloud make such a powerful combination. The methodology is designed to make the team as efficient as possible and the platform is designed to deliver the requisite tools in a highly available, scalable and secure format. The two together can significantly reduce Technical Debt and lower the overall cost of delivering high-quality products in a timely fashion.

Codesion Brings Git to the Enterprise Cloud

copello0 — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:10:00 -0800

Although Codesion has been mainly associated with providing Enterprise Grade Cloud Hosting of Subversion, we are not a Subversion only company. Our philosophy has always been to provide the best of breed tools to help developers get things done. Therefore, I am happy to announce that our Git Hosting product is now generally available (GA).

Ultimately, Codesion believes you, the developer, should have a choice on tools that best suit your mode of development. Now, it is obvious that Codesion won’t be able to provide all the available open source development tools in the Cloud, but we want to provide the most popular ones. The reason for this philosophy is that each organization and developer has different needs. For example, an organization may be familiar with centralized development model with a single trunk, with minimal need for branching or complicated merging. In addition, this organization also needs a lightweight project management tool. In this case, SVN + Trac are perfect tools for this organization. However, we also know that many of you want to develop in a more distributed model. This is where a DVCS like Git becomes useful. The speed, ease of branching and merging becomes important. We want to make sure that we support both, and support both well.

When you consider DVCS development workflows using Git in the context of mission critical development, I believe Codesion Git, now GA, is a smart choice. In a business, it is important to define your blessed repository. No matter how distributed your development workflow is, at some point, a defined, canonical blessed repository is important. This is the source repository that you will deploy to production. This is the repository where all approved code will be merged. This is the repository your developers will perform their initial clone. This is the repository that you should put on Codesion Git.

Why should the blessed repository reside in Codesion?

Codesion provides 99.9% uptime guarantee, and is one of the most reliable cloud providers of source control. We have the numbers to prove it. While Git was in beta, from May 2010 until December 2011, the cumulative uptime in that period is 99.98%. This is one of the most important metrics for a business doing mission critical development. We now have implemented a high availability architecture to insure that we can continue to stand behind 99.9% guarantee.

Enterprise Backup. Many argue that because Git allows a developer to clone the whole repository, you don’t need to have backup. If you have 5 developers, then essentially you have 5 backups because they would have cloned the Git repo locally. I disagree with this. If your blessed repository went down and no longer available, by using the above backup method, you will pick one of the five developer local repos and make that the blessed repository. Would you want to do that? That repo may have changes that are not ready for production. Therefore, you will need to scrub through the repo before it is ready to be the blessed repo. Instead, Codesion performs a multi-layer backup of your blessed repo for you. Our hot backup system backups up your Git repo regularly during the day, several times in an hour. We then have a cold backup system, in a separate data center, that contains your daily blessed repository backup. This insures that you can restore from backups of your blessed repo, not from a repo that is locally residing on your developer machine.

Enterprise Security. Codesion Git provides secure access from both HTTPS and SSH. In addition, you can configure your Git permissions and other services within Codesion via a single unified interface. If you were to host your own Git and Trac, you would have to configure permission separately within each of those applications. With Codesion, you create a developer role that encompasses permissions for both Git and Trac. Our security system then synchronizes the permission down to Git and Trac.

Integrations to Project Management Systems. With Codesion Git, we offer integration to ScrumWorks Pro, TeamForge Project, JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, Trac…and other project management systems. When you perform a push to your Codesion Git repository, you can associate the push to a specific backlog item or defect.

I have just highlighted several key benefits of using Codesion Git hosting as your blessed repository. There are many other features like notification, activity feed reporting, web hooks, ticket integration, and others that I did not speak of in-depth.

Finally, Codesion offers both open source and commercial grade Agile tools all under one roof. You pay one bill, select the number of users that you need, grow your plan on an as needed basis, and have access to a variety of SCM tools (git, svn, cvs), Issue Tracking (Trac, Bugzilla), Agile Project Management (ScrumWorks Pro), and Application Lifecycle Management (TeamForge project). You can start simple with just Git, add Agile Management, and grow to ALM with the same trusted Cloud Development provider.

Try Codesion Git Hosting out FREE for 30 days and let us know what you think.

Interview with Vinay Asthan, VETS, Inc. about being Agile and using ScrumWorks Pro in the Codesion Cloud

nbellcollab — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 06:45:00 -0800

Today we are very pleased to share with you that ScrumWorks Pro (SWP) in the Codesion Cloud is no longer in beta and is now generally available and fully supported. (Read the Press Release here) Congratulations to the Codesion Engineering Dudes on another fine effort and display of brilliant engineering. A big thanks to all the beta customers who provided some great testing and feedback to help us deliver SWP GA. ScrumWorks Pro is now included in our Agile Business and Agile Enterprise plans or Try it FREE for 30 days.

We are also really happy to share with you some insight into one of our customers Agilepracticing customers who uses ScrumWorks Pro, Vinay Asthan from Veterans Enterprise Technology Solutions, Inc., who was an early adopter of ScrumWorks Pro in the Codesion Cloud.

Codesion: What is your role at Veterans Enterprise Technology Solutions?

VA: I am working as a Technical Lead for the Veterans ChampVA ESI project.

Codesion: How many people are there in your development team?

VA: Vets Development teams have over 100+ members, my team is a team of 15 members. I have divided the team into two teams. First team is 8 members, and the second team has 7 members. I am the Scrum Master on both the teams

Codesion: What kind of development projects are you responsible for?

VA: Vets, Inc. is involved in developing applications supporting Veterans Affairs. The Applications vary from Complete solutions, to developing the Front End or Back End Processing

Codesion: What development methodologies do you practice?

VA: Vets has implemented Scrum for the ChampVA ESI application development.

Codesion: How long have you been practicing Agile for? How mature are your Agile practices?

VA: I have been practicing Agile since 2008. I think my Agile/Scrum practice is pretty mature. I am a Certified Scrum Master.

Codesion: What differences have you noticed since adopting Agile practices?

VA: Better team communications and goal oriented efforts – resulting in better productivity.

Codesion: What are your goals for your team when it comes to Agile for the next 12 months?

VA: We are planning to complete two product increments (6 months each) in the coming 12 months. We are just getting started.

Codesion: Why did you choose ScrumWorks Pro on Codesion as your Agile project management solution?

VA: It started out when I was looking for a team collaboration tool for the team following Scrum. I tried the trial version of Codesion, and it seemed like a perfect fit. The team is happy using the tool, as it is very easy to use. The product owner is happy as they get to see the progress by the team.

Codesion: What other products did you compare with ScrumWorks Pro?

VA: VersionOne and Microsoft Team Foundation Server.

Codesion: What recommendations would you make to your industry peers when looking for an Agile project management solution?

VA: I will highly recommend Codesion, as Scrumworks is a great tool to manage any Scrum, including multiple teams – very easy to use. Additionally, Codesion also provides access to Bugzilla, a nice defect tracking system. Pricing model is also just right, fits our and most small and mid-size businesses. It does not break the bank with the subscription based model.

Codesion: What other applications/services are you using or plan to use on the Codesion Cloud Platform?

VA: Bugzilla, and probably SVN.

Codesion: Thanks Vinay for sharing and happy Scrumming!

Learn more about ScrumWorks Pro on Codesion here.

Monthly Uptime Report Now Available!

tonamedina — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:24:00 -0800

One of Codesion’s main strengths is undoubtedly Uptime.

Yes, servers in general do love to go down, and, yes, Codesion is not exempt to this. That being said, even when our services might be temporary down, and while we quickly capture it in our status page, we are proud of the excellent job our SysAdmins do to consistently keep our 99.9% SLA for our Business plan users.

In that regard we came to one conclusion: “If this is one of our main strengths, why not make our Uptime report available to all our users to see?” And so we have.

As part of our recent initiatives for our Customer Success program, and increasing our Business transparency, you can now come to ONE place to get an accurate gauge on how Codesion services are really doing lately.

Where can you find this Uptime Report?

Easy… In our status page too (BTW we encourage you to subscribe for updates by entering your email there).

Simply visit our status page, and click on our Monthly Uptime Report Page:

How good is Codesion supposed to be doing?

If you are on our Business plans (or above), we are required to comply with our High Availability offering that entitles you to a 99.9% uptime.

If you have only a Personal plan (formerly known as Team Edition), we do not have an SLA in place. If you are doing mission critical development, and must have an SLA in place, please consider upgrading to a Business plan.

If you have any questions, please send us an email.

Cheers!
Tona
Your Friendly Customer Success Manager
Codesion - CollabNet Cloud Service

300!!!

socollabnet — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:38:00 -0700

In addition to Codesion’s thousands of Personal Plan customers, we are eager to announce that the Codesion Cloud Business won its 300th Professional Edition (now named “Business”) customer. Given that we only announced our 200th Professional Edition customer in April of this year, taking only half the amount of time to reach this milestone, it’s terrific to see the accelerating momentum in the market for Enterprise-grade, cloud hosted developer solutions.

In 2009, Codesion (known as CVS Dude) focused on providing the best Subversion and Git hosting services to our Personal Plan users. Thanks to customers’ requests, we created Business Plans with enhanced features and benefits to support the growing Enterprise market. Customers can benefit from a complete OS developer suite (SVN & Git integrated with Trac and Bugzilla), collaboration tools like TeamForge, daily backups, and 24x7x365 support. In addition, we released the ScrumWorks Pro Beta integration in September of this year, providing customers an Agile Project Management solution.

As we leave October and surpass our 300th customer, it’s important to recognize the hard efforts of our Codesion Business Unit team. Their unequivocal dedication to providing the leading Enterprise-grade Subversion, Git and CVS hosting services is what makes each day an exciting one. Stay tuned as we are soon to announce the GA release of our Agile Project Management solution, ScrumWorks Pro, and our new Git enhancements.

Another new GIT feature: GIT External Integration

nbellcollab — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:03:44 -0700

Keep them coming! We are very pleased to have released another great new GIT feature, GIT External Integration. What this means is that GIT can now send commit messages and update statuses to your trackers including Trac, and other services. You no longer need to open up your trackers to update, close or append tickets.

The ability to be able to automatically send commit messages to your other services will save you some serious time. It’s available now. Go try it out and tell us what you think.

For more information and the correct syntax to use, check out this knowledge article

CollabNet Desktop for Outlook and your Teamforge in Codesion

tonamedina — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:53:00 -0700

Did you know that CollabNet offers an MS Outlook plugin to connect and use your Teamforge instance? This means users get more control for accessing their Teamforge artifacts right from within MS Outlook—a place where you might be already spending great deal of time.

So, if you are using Teamforge in CollabNet Cloud Services, and also using MS Outlook, please take a look at our article that walks you through the setup process.

Click here for more info on how to set this up…

New GIT feature: Commit Activity Feed

copello0 — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:58:00 -0700

Codesion customers have been asking us when git will exit out of beta…well, we have an answer for you. The Codesion team has been diligently iterating our Enterprise GA in order to go GA in Q4, 2011!

Thanks to our customers’ request, we released a new feature: bringing git commits as part of our activity feed. Make sure you configure your git configuration with your identity when installing git on your desktop. Doing this step ensures git activities are identifying you correctly:

git config —global user.name “your name”

git config —global user.email “youremail@email.com”

WEBINAR RECAP: Codesion ScrumWorks Pro Live Demo Replay

socollabnet — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:27:04 -0700

This week sales engineer Caleb Brown hosted the webinar, “Codesion ScrumWorks Pro Live Demo.” Caleb conducted a poll at the beginning of the webinar, asking attendees their top reason for attendance. The results showed that over 50% were interested in learning the general features of ScrumWorks Pro. If you missed the live session, you can watch the recording here.

Here’s a followup to the live audience questions.

Q: How easy is it to balance and redistribute workload between developers?

A: The Team Member Load report can aid with this task, showing each team member’s work load (including work being done across other projects). Re-balancing a workload is as simple as changing the Point Person on a task.

Q: We estimate our Stories in Ideal Days, does that work in ScrumWorks?

A: Any estimation scale works within ScrumWorks.

Q: We have a manager who insists on micromanaging our team, can we block him/her from seeing our tasks?

A: Roles and Permissions are often used to deny people in certain roles visibility to artifacts like Tasks, removing the tools necessary to micromanage.

Q: How should I show progress to my customer on major feature development(s)?

A: A variety of reports in ScrumWorks Pro can show this. Typically the Themes feature is used to tag the work done for a specific customer, then the reports are generated using Web Reports, filtered by that customer’s theme. The big benefit to reporting in this fashion is that the reports are dynamically updated so that the customer can view the status of their work in real time.

Q: Why do you have a desktop client? Isn’t that old technology?

A: The Desktop Client uses Java Web Start, which provides most of the Benefits of a Web Client in that you never need to update or install it, these things happen automatically. This technology allows for things that Web Clients just can’t do very well, such as Keyboard Shortcuts and Speedy Mass Updates. It also shortcuts many of the problems with Web Clients, such as add-ons and plug-ins that stop a web client from running. There are many reasons our existing customers do not wish us to deprecate the Desktop Client, and I expect it will stick around for a little while longer.

Q: How can billing be accomplished? My people are time and materials, hours towards deliverables matters.

A: Typically the “Hours Spent by Theme” report is used for this purpose. You can use it to select a date range and display the total hours spent on every backlog item tagged with that specific theme.

Q: Effort points and hours? Which drives the other? Do they automatically adjust each other, or do we need to update both.

A: Hours spent, hours remaining, and Effort Estimations are all completely separate from each other and are used for different metrics. Hours remaining feed into reports such as the sprint burn-down or the team member load report. Hours spent are typically used for billing purposes. The Effort Estimations are used for all reporting that crosses teams and sprints and when you measure the rate at which the teams complete the effort estimates (as velocity) form a basis for planning.

For those interesting in trialing ScrumWorks Pro, there’s a free 30 day trial of the tool on Codesion.com. Click here to find more information. Feel free to send us an email if you have any questions or or comments.

Fast Track Your Subversion Journey to the Cloud - Q&A

copello0 — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:29:58 -0700

On September 28^th, I co-presented the webinar, “Fast-Track your Subversion Journey to the Cloud,” with Bob Jenkins, Director, Subversion Services at CollabNet. We covered deployment options for SVN - on-site, hybrid or cloud and how to decide what’s best for your organization. We also talked about solutions and services to help your organization transition to the cloud. We encouraged our attendees to come to the session armed with all the questions they have always wanted to ask about Subversion. As a result, we received many great questions that we just couldn’t get to during the live event, so we have provided answers to the audience’s questions below.

If you missed the live session, you can watch the recording and download my slides. I also encourage you to download CollabNet Subversion Edge as is the answer for easy installation, administration, security, and governance of your Subversion environment. Also, don’t forget to register for our upcoming webinars. CollabNet offers multiple webinars a month that cover a variety of topics related to software development.

As promised, here’s the follow up to the live audience questions.

Q: When will SVN 1.7 be available?
A: It is available now! Please visit: Subversion 1.7.0 Release Candidate to learn more.

Q: How does IP restrictions work in Codesion?

A: We have an IP Whitelist feature. You simply tell us what IP should be allowed (whitelisted), and all other connections to Codesion services will be denied.

Q: Can you expand on SVN replication – when to use, when not to use?

A: SVN replication typically is used for 2 purposes. First, to gain local performance in a global architecture. Second, it can be used to provide high availability by mirroring your SVN server. In the case of Cloud SVN, with Codesion, you can rest assure that your SVN services are redundant (we have RAID’d servers, and provide 99.9% uptime), however, you can also leverage Push Backups to replicate to a local SVN server via svnsync for ultimate peace of mind. We can also offer our customers replicated SVN in different geographic areas to improve performance.

Q: Can I access TeamForge and ScrumWorks pro in the cloud?

A: Of course! All Free Trials include full access to all Codesion features/services for free for 30 days. And you can be accessing TeamForge or ScrumWorks Pro in several minutes. To continue using these services beyond your trial you will need to select the appropriate plan.

Q: For on-premises, what back-up strategy do you recommend?

A: Always backup often and off-site.

For example in Codesion, we do backup every 10 minutes, and we place those backups in a complete different data center (ie: If the SVN servers are in Dallas, TX, we transfer the 10/30 backups - via a private subnet - to other 2 different data centers: Seattle, and Washington, DC).

That way we can even react in utterly unexpected events - like even natural disasters.

Q: How are upgrades managed in Codesion? As a customer, can I choose when to upgrade?

A: Actually, yes, you can!

For most of our plans, the servers are upgraded together. In this case, all SVN repositories on that server is upgraded at the same time. However, with our more advanced, enterprise grade plans, we can offer a dedicated SVN server. In that case, we can work with our customers to schedule a upgrade of their SVN server.

Q: Where are your data centers?

A: At the moment we have 4 SAS70 compliant data centers: 3 in the US, and 1 in data center in Europe. (By default all our users are placed in the US, but if desired, you can request to be placed in Europe.)

In the US, the data centers are located in: Dallas, TX., Seattle, WA., and Washington, DC.

In the EU, the data center is in: Haarlem, Netherlands.

Q: How can I migrate my local SVN repo to Codesion?

A: As simply as uploading your SVN dump, and running our import wizard

Q: Can I use SVNE with my existing SVN server?

A: SVNE is the server… You probably want to leverage SVNE to the fullest by making it the replacement of your current SVN server. It’s the same SVN, but SVNE easier to manage…. Of course, for zero server installation/maintenance consider Codesion Cloud Services.

Q: What’s your uptime guarantee?

A: We have 99.9% Uptime SLA for our Business plans and Private Clouds! - And it’s not rare to enjoy uptime hovering 99.99%

Q: Is this happening now?

A: You bet!… It’s happening right here, right now!

Q: Does CollabNet host subversion for a CJIS compliant clients?

A: We are SAS70, and PCI compliant. Also have Government departments as customers using Codesion services. And CollabNet has implemented forge.mil for the US DoD - But please do raise up to your Sales rep. any questions you might have about your particular organization requirements.

Q: Are there any restriction to the environment of your network before going to a cloud solution?

A: When it comes to a public cloud, like Codesion’s Enterprise grade Subversion hosting, because of the multitenant nature of the solution, we don’t allow SSH access to the servers for example.

However, when it comes to a Private or Hybrid Cloud you have much more control over the infrastructure and network.

Q: How would you compare Subversion to GIT?

A: With Codesion Cloud Services…. you can actually compare them yourself!!

Codesion does offer both Subversion and GIT. So you can be sure that our platform will support your organizational mood changes.

What’s best? You can find plenty of endless (borderline religious) discussions on which one is best (we did one analysis too). But, that really depends on you and your organization wants/needs.

They are both mature enough, widely used (SVN is by far the most popular, however), and they will both keep revisions of your source code in a reliable approach.

But… are you excited about leveraging distributed repositories, and having each developer be free of a centralized-only repo - then give GIT a try in Codesion, and see what’s all about.

Or, if just the thought of having multiple different independent repositories make you cringe - then just stick to Subversion also available in Codesion.

Q: Are there any migration tools to move from PVCS version manager to Subversion Edge or even other SCM’s like one from Oracle to Subversion?

A: In Codesion we do have Professional Service available for these type of scenarios. We have done multiple conversions of Perforce, SourceSafe, CVS, etc… Please contact our support@codesion.com for more details. (Be sure to create a Free Trial first).

WEBINAR RECAP: Codesion ScrumWorks Pro Live Demo

socollabnet — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:31:36 -0700

Codesion kicked off this week with an “ScrumWorks Pro Live Demo” webinar hosted by our Sales Engineer, Caleb Brown. Caleb provided a concise overview of the tool followed by an in depth demo of the product features and functionality. No need to kick yourself for missing the opportunity to hear what ScrumWorks Pro has to offer because, Codesion will be hosting the same webinar live next Tuesday, October 4. Click here to register.

Below are some great questions we received from this week’s webinar.

Q: How do I show progress to my customer on major feature development(s)?

A: Web Reports are ideal for this. Flag the work for a specific customer once you build them a theme. You can then generate a host of reports that are easily accessible by the customer to keep them updated (up to the second) on the status of their project. The Release Forecast Report, Epic Progress Report, and Release Burn-up are commonly used for this purpose.

Q: How easy is it to balance and redistribute workload between developers?

A: The Team Member Load report is commonly used to display the workloads and aid in re-balancing. Moving tasks from one team member to another is simply a matter of changing the point person

Q: Awhile back I saw a demo of TeamForge. What is the comparison between Scrum Works and TeamForge. Do they overlap? Used together, etc.?

A: It is noteworthy that in Agile practice, workloads are balanced by the self-organizing team. Work isn’t assigned, it is volunteered for. The practice of a Daily Stand Up meeting involves the team discussing workload and redistributing as needed. The key word being Daily, if a workload is too much or too little, the team will correct that (at most) the next day. This re-balancing is just one of the little things that leads to true team building, and contributes to sustaining team stability that meaningful metrics rely upon.

The Team Member Load report, as mentioned above, is often useful for a team during the stand up. Most commonly it is used for those team members (such as a Database Expert or Designer) who must work across multiple teams. The report will show each team member’s workload across all teams that they are a part of.

Q: Is there a free trial of this tool on Codesion?

A: Absolutely! Click here for a free 30 day trial on Codesion. You can also find more information about ScrumWorks Pro on Codesion here. Send us an email if you have any questions getting on board.

ScrumWorks Pro + Codesion = The Agile Cloud Platform

guymarion — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:59:40 -0700

Today we are pleased to announce the Beta availability of ScrumWorks Pro – the popular Agile Project Management solution – delivered from CollabNet’s Codesion Cloud platform. Try it out!

ScrumWorks Pro (SWP) is available to all Trial and Agile Business (formerly Professional Edition) customers. With the addition of SWP to the existing Codesion source code management and project management dev suite, we now have a well-rounded set of services that span from Subversion & Git source code management for personal projects, through to agile management applications used by thousands of small to mid-sized businesses.

About ScrumWorks Pro

For months (even years), Codesion customers have been requesting an agile project management solution that would allow teams to manage all of your Scrum project and program needs, sprints, releases, product backlogs, with reporting and analytics. ScrumWorks Pro is a purpose built, intuitive web application that is augmented by a downloadable desktop client. Developed by thought leaders that have helped lead the broader industry adoption of Agile and scrum methodologies, ScrumWorks’s roots lie in a scrum training business. Like Codesion, ScrumWorks Pro joined the CollabNet family in 2010 through the acquisition of Danube.

What does ScrumWorks Pro have to offer?

Enhanced Project and Agile Team Collaboration: Project management, release planning, team task boards, sprint task tracking, & product backlog

Iterations Management: Define “sprints” of arbitrary length, transfer items from the product backlog to the spring backlog using drag-and-drop, managing tasks quickly

Integrated role-based security: Configure SWP permissions directly through Codesion’s security system, as you do for SVN, Trac, or Bugzilla

Improved Visibility into your Agile Projects: Extensive reporting, forecasting and analytics; Real-time dashboards, ROI, velocity, burn-down & and burn-up charts.

Reporting and Analysis: Drive decision making with empirical data

How can I access ScrumWorks Pro?

ScrumWorks Pro can be trialed free for 30 days. From there, you will need to sign up for our new “Agile Business” plan. Note that the first 5 and 10 users are available in our two Starter Packs, which include access to ScrumWorks Pro, for reduced rates of $99/mo and $220/mo respectively.

What else is coming from the Codesion Cloud Platform?

This is just the beginning. We have some major advancements planned for the near future that will significantly improve the experience of developing in and for the cloud- so watch this space! And as always, please drop your comments below - how can we improve?

Codesion is Repackaging Plans -- But Not Raising Prices

guymarion — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:57:00 -0700

Since being acquired by CollabNet, the Codesion team and CollabNet has been hard at work improving the Codesion product suite to better fit the needs of our customers.

Background

By and large, Codesion customers fall into two camps: a) development teams using Codesion as a code and issue tracking service for personal or private projects, and b) small to mid-sized businesses seeking the reliability, support, and project management services needed for core development operations. We are focusing development efforts to improve our offering for both camps, and we have repackaged our plans to better focus on each. Note that pricing has not changed for either (in fact, we’ve slightly reduced the prices of our “Business” plans).

Changes to Plan Packages

First, Team Edition has been renamed as the “Personal” plan. The Personal plan includes our full suite of open source tools, including SCM (SVN/Git), issue and bug tracking (Bugzilla and Trac), as well as interaction with popular third party apps like Basecamp, Pivotal Tracker, and FogBuz. Personal plans are available in four flavors: Nano (2 users & 2 projects), Micro (5 users & 5 projects), Small (10 users & 10 projects), and Medium (25 users & 25 projects). Existing customers will remain on “Team Edition” plans until you upgrade to a new “Personal” Or “Business Plan”

Second, Professional Edition has been repackaged into three different “Business” plans. These plans are designed for workgroups and companies using Codesion to support mission-critical development and agile operations. The three plans are:

“Business”: includes all the great tools & features in the Personal plans, plus the advanced security and backup modules, hosting on high availability infrastructure (with full failover support), support and uptime SLAs, and integrations with external agile products like Rally, Atlassian JIRA, and VersionOne.
“Agile Business”: adds the industry leading Agile Project Management tool, ScrumWorks Pro. Learn more about ScrumWorks Pro in today’s release announcement.
“Agile Enterprise”: adds both ScrumWorks Pro for Agile Project Management, and TeamForge Project for complete end-to-end application lifecycle management.

For more details visit our new Plans Overview page. Your feedback is important, and we have listened. So keep the feedback flowing!

End of Summer Brings New Hires & Git Enterprise Backups

tonamedina — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:03:00 -0700

Git Enterprise Backups

You probably didn’t know… but Codesion supports Git— Yes, Git!

Git in Codesion is still in Beta… but that’s about to change very soon. We have a whole development team solely dedicated to bringing Git up to par with other Codesion offerings.

The first step towards achieving this goal was to bring the Enterprise Level Backups to the central Git…now you have it! If you are using Git in Codesion, your central Git repository will get backed-up many times throughout the day. To ensure security and enhance redundancy, this backup is placed in another data center miles away from the original repository (we use SAS70 data centers in Seattle, Dallas, and Washington DC).

The next steps for Git? We plan to have the following soon: (UPDATED 12/15/2011)

- SSH-key based authentication (DONE)

- External ticket integration (DONE)

- 99.9% SLA Guarantee (DONE)

- Post Commit Hooks (DONE)

- Commit Notifications (DONE)

(UPDATE: Enterprise Git in Codesion is now GA)

End of Summer Brings New Hires

Summer is officially over - not like SF got to taste it for very long, but with Codesion’s hiring boom, our new hires are consistently bringing in sunshine into our growing office.

This past August was like 1999 for us - we have hired a LOT of new folks including developers, sysadmins, marketing and sales dudes. You will certainly see new features coming your way as a result of this expansion.

Here is a pic of our latest lunch with the Codesion U.S. team. We also have folks in Australia, India, Bulgaria, and Dubai.

WEBINAR RECAP: Cutting Edge Cloud Development Platform for Force.com

tonamedina — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:22:00 -0700

Today Codesion hosted a webinar entitled “Cutting Edge Cloud Development Platform for Force.com,” which attracted over 100 attendees and many questions. Watch the recording.

Willie Wang, Codesion’s VP of Products & Services, and Brian Matthews, Founder and CTO of BrainEngine, demonstrated the Developer Workbench - Codesion cloud development solution. This is an IDE designed with Force.com development, and integrates SVN and team management. Also, Brain Engine is fully integrated with Teamforge for build management, and with Codesion Publisher for direct deployment to Force.com.

In case you missed it, here you can access the webinar recording and the slide presentation. Finally, here are the actual attendee questions from the session:

Q: Is the Desktop IDE Windows only?

A: At this moment yes. However, the Cloud IDE - Workbench Next - will be platform independent.

Q: Is it on the roadmap for Smoke tests aka automated deploy and script validation at a smoke level?

A: Yes, that’s something that we are taking a look at… and it is in the roadmap

Q: Are the record changes documented? aka Previous Values and current values in SVN as a change log?

A: Correct, SVN track every file revision and has a full log to show you a history of your versions and changes.

Q: Is it possible to use git instead of svn?

A: Codesion does offer git service, however, the in-depth integration is currently available for SVN for now, git is on the roadmap.

Q: can you tell me where to get documentation on the recipe for the publisher

A: Yes, you can find more info at help.codesion.com, or emailing support@codesion.com

Q: Is it Workbench (the demonstrated IDE) crucial? Or the same cloud solution can be done in VS or eclipse?

A: You won’t be able to do the same things in VS or eclipse, BrainEngine IDE has much more capabilities for deployment and development specifically for Force.com

Q: Development workbench is like Teamforge?

A: BrainEngine Development Workbench is the IDE, like Eclipse or Visual Studio, but specifically for Force.com development.

TeamForge is the Agile Lifecycle Management tool, where you enter your defects, user stories, product backlog items, it also integrates with SVN.

Q: when will the cloud ide be available

A: It will be available later today. Please check brainengine.net

Q: does workbench support non-developer metadata (layouts, custom objects, profile etc) does also address metadata larger then 400MB limit when dealing with large orgs

A: Yes, you can download everything that fits within your Salesforce org limits.

Q: does it save to force.com or repository on save? And what happen if the code in invalid.

A: Both ways. It actually connects to the objects in real time back to Salesforce.

Q: can we get dev org or test access

A: Of course, you can sign up for a Force developer account for free at force.com, you can download BrainEngine ide at www.brainengine.net, you can sign up for a trial account at Codesion for SVN, TeamForge at http://codesion.com

Q: Is TeamForge the only ALM tool that this product can integrate with?

A: Yes. BrainEngine and CollabNet have partner up to bring Teamforge integration and deployment through Codesion (CollabNet’s cloud services).

Q: Did you say that you could run queries from the IDE instead using other apps like Apex Explorer and if so can you give a quick example

A: Yes. You are just limited by Salesforce allows you to do.

Q: Could you post the URL where we can get access to the Cloud based IDE? Also, am already using Codesion/SVN — do i have to buy them separately?

A: Yes, the IDE is provide by BrainEngine.net - our partner - however, you’d need to visit their site to access the IDE.

Q: If I have to roll back to a previous release in a sandbox, will this software automatically sync up the sandbox org to the previous release configuration (e.g. delete any classes that were added)

A: Yes, you can go back to an older version and trigger a new build and publish that.

Q: is this demo the browser IDE or the desktop IDE?

A: The video from the webinar demo correspond to the Desktop IDE.

Q: Post the discount URL!!

A: The discount promocode for Codesion (new Pro signups or Pro upgrades) offered to our attendees (and readers of this post) can be found here

Yes, we are "hiring like it's 1999."

tonamedina — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:47:00 -0700

Yes, we are hiring like it’s 1999.

Codesion is growing! Seriously.
Wanna work with the Codesion dudes? Check these out and send your resumes away…

Technical Support Engineer
~~Online Marketing Manager~~ HIRED
~~Sales Development Representative~~ HIRED
~~Sr. Product Marketing Manager~~ HIRED
~~Lead User Experience Designer~~ HIRED
Rails Engineer
~~Web UI Engineer~~ HIRED
~~Sr. Systems Engineer~~ HIRED

We upgraded Trac!!

tonamedina — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:40:00 -0700

We’ve been quiet about this one - it was announced in our Status page, but other than that there was not much publicity around it.

However, now that most wrinkles are ironed out, we are ready to make a big noise about it, and well here it comes (drumroll….):

We have now upgraded all our Trac instances to the latest-and-greatest (stable) Trac version: Trac 0.12.2!!! (Yay!)

This was certainly a challenging project, and we are very proud to have completed it satisfactorily. The main reason of the complexity - and obstacles that our awesome SysAdmins had to deal with - is the amount of plugins that we support at the moment (18 different plugins) - Making sure that all these plugins were still working properly after the upgrade was a very challenging task - (Thanks Tim!).

We are pretty happy with the results, however, some of you have custom settings that might need closer attention. If you see something not expected, please kindly write us to support@codesion.com, and we’ll make sure that all is in order.

Why did Codesion make this upgrade?

Our previous Trac version was getting rapidly outdated. However, more importantly, you guys asked for it (Upgrading Trac was the second most voted feature request in our portal).

Can I opt out and stay on the old version?

No. We no longer support the previous version (0.11.x), and all new and existing Trac instances will be now Trac 0.12.2

What’s new?

There is a few changes here and there. But most importantly, there is a lot of bug fixes. For the whole detailed list please see the Trac changelog.

Also, this upgrade means that we will be able to continue to add more plugins in the future that are designed for this newer version.

For more questions (or issues) please write us to support@codesion.com