Month: October 2016

The biggest development this past week is work on GForge AS v6.4.3 has started and we anticipate having it available for current customers by the end of this year.  Obviously we’ll continue work on GForgeNEXT which is accurately reflected in the highlight from last week below:

1. Git Server Side Merges – Right now server side merges work between any two branches except when the destination branch is master. Turns out the is a bug with Git itself and we already have a patch from the Git development team and we’ll continue testing that out.
2. Continuous Integration – We’ve begun designing the mocks required for building a Continuous Integration dashboard for all GForgeNEXT projects using Jenkins. This will complete our vision of making the integration between GForgeNEXT and CI systems tighter which reflects how integral they are to software teams.
3. GForgeNEXT iOS – The first view for the GForgeNEXT iOS app has been stubbed out and work will continue over the coming months.
4. Dependency Management – When a ticket has predecessors (i.e. blocking dependents) when those tickets are taken care of GForgeNEXT will notify the assignee and submitter of the ticket that work can begin on that ticket.  Those notifications will happen with growls which are also sent via push notifications via Adroid/iOS application. This is a big step towards helping PMs and project leads with automated dependency management.
5. Improved Link Handling in Docman – Currently in 6.4.2 and prior the links to documents in docman explicitly ping to the most current version (i.e. version 7). The problem is if you email that or include it in a ticket or wiki entry that version may eventually be replaced with newer ones.  We’ve made it so the links in docman will always give users the most current version.  Don’t worry you can still explicitly send the link to a specific version of a file if you want.
6. A handful of bug fixes for v6.4.3 are being actively worked on.

Beginning this month our team will be giving weekly updates on the GForgeNEXT development.  This won’t be the painful details just the good stuff boiled down to a few talking points. We should be clear that GForgeNEXT is in open beta at https://next.gforge.com so sign-up today! Before we give our first update we’d like to share what exactly where GForgeNEXT sits.

1. Teams – You can invite new or existing GForgeNEXT users to your projects.  When you do so, you pick their role and once the invite accepted they can begin collaboration.
2. Tickets – plan and distribute work across your team.  We honor existing workflow rules, however, administration of those rules doesn’t exist yet. Browsing and filtering of tickets works just fine.  In short while some admin function do exist yet the ticketing system is working well for day-to-day use.
3. Stand-up Report – GForge provide each project with a stand-up report. See what each team member has accomplished, what they are working on and what they plan on working on.
4. Git Support – Browse branches, tags and commits through the UI (merges and merge requests are under development).
5. Continuous Integration – Our new Jenkins plugin uses the latest Jenkins release which will pave the road for new features. Right now the Jenkins plugin accurately reports build activity back to the GForgeNEXT project and this is fully tested and working. Future work will include building a CI dashboard in GForgeNEXT.
6. Android Support – Access chatroom and tickets all while getting push notifications while you are on the go. (iOS application is under development).
7. Language Support – GForgeNEXT will eventually support multiple languages.  Right now we support Spanish and English and the language is set based on browser preferences which is nice for new users.

Update for 9/30/2016

1. Git – Server side merges is code complete and being tested internally. Once this is done we will move right into merge requests.
2. Notification Center – this feature is similar to what you see on social media sites like Facebook. This week we are adding additional formatting to notifications (date of notification and project it was generated from).  The posts are also now navigable, taking the user to the proper artifact (i.e. ticket, chat, etc)
3. iOS App – Development began last week.
4. Responsive UI – We’ve been doing testing to ensure GForgeNEXT renders and functions properly using the small displays on mobile devices.  The only area giving us problems was the mega-menu (the main way to navigate projects on the device)
5. Tickets – We’re making dependency management a key feature when working with tickets.  The search API for tickets in GForgeNEXT had to be expended to make this possible and we’ve updated the interface to make this as slick as possible.  We will be sure to call attention to any ticket you are viewing that has dependencies.

As always we welcome questions on any of the activity you see.