What’s happening in Labs

Friday, June 28, 2013 Luix 4 Comments

Today I’m glad to announce two important features requested by users in our User Voice that are available now in our Labs section:

• Editable diffs
• Coloured changesets by user in the Branch Explorer 

Both have been requested by lots of people, so I think that they worthed their own post. Take into account that these features are only available in our Labs downloads section, release 4.2.37.455.

The state of the art in merge technology

Wednesday, June 26, 2013 Pablo Santos merging , semanticmerge 2 Comments

Software development is a team sport. Each team member develops his part and all parts are frequently glued together. Unless you code in a cave in the dark you’ll be running some sort of merge operation to put all the different parts together.

My goal with this post is to showcase what can be achieved today with modern merge technology.

The reason is that as developers we are normally constrained by the tools we use on a daily basis, and sometimes is good to raise our expectations by looking into what can be achieved, then being able to conclude whether we are interested or not.

Pablo Santos

I'm the CTO and Founder at Códice.
I've been leading Plastic SCM since 2005. My passion is helping teams work better through version control.
I had the opportunity to see teams from many different industries at work while I helped them improving their version control practices.
I really enjoy teaching (I've been a University professor for 6+ years) and sharing my experience in talks and articles.
And I love simple code. You can reach me at @psluaces.

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.454 External Release is out!!

Wednesday, June 26, 2013 Luix 0 Comments

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.454 (Vigo) is available!

You have the full list of changes here. Visit the Plastic SCM download page to install or upgrade your Plastic SCM setup.

Please, suggest and vote new features on the User's Voice or the forum.

This release includes the following brand new features and bugfixes:

New

Encoding options (requested by customer): Now the encoding option in the CodeReview, DiffTool and MergeTool has been split into 2 different ones:

• Default encoding: defines the encoding to use when no encoding is detected. By default it is NONE, which implies that the files are handled on raw mode.
• Result encoding that specifies the encoding for the result file. By default it is NONE, which implies that the encoding of the result file will be set depending on the contributors encodings.

Take into account the following:

• The old option has been mapped to the default encoding, so the old configured encoding will be used as default encoding. 
• In order to use the new "result encoding" option, please configure it on the mergetool command. This can be done adding the parameter:

-re="@resultencoding" or selecting "Plastic SCM merge tool

, which already includes it.

The recent comments in the new branch dialog and the Pending Changes dialog have been improved. If a comment is reused on a branch it will be placed on the top of the list.

Request from the User Voice: A new "Open with" menu has been added to the Preferences panel, where the user can customize the tools that will be displayed in the "Open with" context menu, available on the Pending changes view, the Item view and the History view. Let's see an example for Notepad++:

Open the Preferences dialog and select "Custom 'Open with'...":

Then, click on "Add...", type a friendly name for the application and select the application, specifying how such program opens a file:

And that's it! Now you can open whatever item controlled by Plastic SCM with your program:

GUI (requested in the User Voice): Branches, Changesets and History views now highlight the row corresponding to the loaded object in the workspace. This is how the Branches view
looks like now:

The Changesets view:

And the History view:

Requested from the User Voice: The Branch Explorer now shows a panel with the branch, label or changeset properties, when you hover on one of these with the mouse.

Performance

The number of needed server calls to perform a differences operation from the Branch Explorer has been reduced to the half. The number of server calls to perform an add operation have been significantly reduced. We've reduced approximately from 1 call for each added item to 2 in the whole operation.

Bugs

When the server was unreachable under some special network configurations the replication command could return a null reference error. This is fixed now.

Reported by customer: When the Pending Changes contained a pending merge that was already merged on the new Head, the Update Merge operation wasn't allowed. Fixed.

GUI: When a workspace was deleted, some views belonging to the deleted workspace were not disposed. Fixed now.

GUI: Fixed some aesthetic issues in the JIRA preferences panel.

Branch Explorer: An issue that caused the display of the "Home" icon in two different changesets has been fixed.

Code review tool: The informative panel was displaying overlapped lines. This message was shown when there are newer changesets than the ones that were commented in the review. Fixed.

Several aesthetical issues fixed related to buttons alignment.

In addition to that the "View contributors" button image in the Merge dialog has been replaced with text, and the tab-order has been fixed as well.

Fixed an issue that prevented the following dialogs from displaying correctly with the newest (> 3.0) versions of Mono under Linux:

• Add to cloaked
• Add to ignore
• Add to hidden changes
• Delete item.

And tomorrow most of you will be pretty glad to see what we've ready for you!! Stay tunned!!!

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.450 External Release is out!!

Monday, June 17, 2013 Luix 0 Comments

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.450 (Porto) is ready right now!

Check the full list of changes here and visit the Plastic SCM download page to install or upgrade your Plastic SCM setup.

As usual, you can suggest and vote new features on the Plastic SCM Forum page and tell us your opinion about Plastic SCM or use the User's Voice channel, as well.

Let's see what's new and fixed in this release:

The PainKiller Team

Thursday, June 13, 2013 Luix 0 Comments

During the last sprint, we created a new team: “the PainKillers”. Their purpose was to implement new features requested by users as well as fix bugs that were reported. The aim is “to reduce the user pain” (more about User Pain here).

This story is about how creating a small team, giving it a cool name, and defining a very clear aim boosts motivation and focus. Let’s say that this is a real implementation of The Black Team described by Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco in Peopleware: Productive projects and teams.

Tracking user requests

We track new features requested by users on our UserVoice. We review the status of the requests at the beginning of every sprint (two weeks’ time). A typical sprint planning entry has a section like the following in our wiki:

We also track bugs reported by customers using our internal issue tracking system (we use our own Task Tracking System, called TTS, see some pictures here. So we have a report to list the top bugs sorted by user pain (both reported by customers and found internally). Again, a typical sprint planning meeting has an entry like the following:

Requests and bugs coming from the forum are introduced in the TTS and handled as bugs found by users.

The Painkiller Team

We always included the entire “pain related tasks” as part of the regular planning process, but during the last sprint we came up with a new strategy: focus part of the team specifically on the “PainKiller” tasks. The idea is a “sub-team” dedicated full-time to the happiness of our Plastic SCM users.

So we got together a list of requests, assigned them, and started to work. The result was awesome: We resolved 38 tasks regarding customer requests in a two week timespan, most of them integrated in the last public releases 4.1.10.443 and 4.1.10.445. Besides these, a few tasks were handed over to our latest labs version 4.2.33.444.
The results were so delightful that we have decided to repeat the experience in the current sprint.

We even have our own logo, and maybe T-shirts in the near future, who knows…

Why does it work?

We always focused, as a team, on reducing the “user pain”. But as the team grows, and especially for newcomers, fixing issues, and doing “small new features” (and not focusing day and night on cool features like improving the merge system, creating semantic merge or improving performance under heavy load feels like something "not so important".

So this initiative is working great because it gives all team members (a bunch of experienced developers together with new hires) a global view of how important reducing the user pain is. We all see immediate feedback since customers receive the releases on a weekly basis, with an impact not only on user satisfaction but also in sales.

It is also a great opportunity for new engineers to put themselves on the front-line, dealing with production code and knowing they are the ones to get this specific issue fixed, taking responsibility, and enabling other senior team members to focus on other tasks. There’s no best way to really learn than fighting in the front line and being the one who has to make it work. By the way, as release manager, I know every task we integrate is peer reviewed and functionally validated, so we still have a security net to make sure things don’t break, along with the daily 24h of automated testing, of course.

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.447 External Release is out!!

Monday, June 10, 2013 Luix 0 Comments

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.447 (Bilbao) is out there!

Check the full list of changes here and visit the Plastic SCM download page to install or upgrade your Plastic SCM setup.

As usual, you can suggest and vote new features on the Plastic SCM Forum page and tell us your opinion about Plastic SCM or use the User's Voice channel, as well.

New

Hide ignored items in the Items view (requested from the User Voice): We've added a new option to hide ignored changes. This option is not checked by default, so you'll see the ignored items in the Items view and if you want to hide them go to Preferences -> Other options and check the "Hide ignored items in the Items view" option.

Take into account that this option does not work in the Pending Changes view, which has its own preference to show / hide Ignored items.

Bugs

GUI (requested by customer): An error was being thrown when the user removed a workspace and then performed a switch to a branch (or changeset, or label) operation on a different workspace. Fixed.

GUI: When we had a workspace pointing to a unreachable server, the Items view got a bit stucked. This is now fixed: a proper message is shown so that the user can update to the right server and thus the issue is solved.

Update merge (forum request): When working in a certain changeset that is not the HEAD of the branch and a checkin was carried out (an update merge takes place, since there are newer changes on the server) the selector was not updated to the resulting changeset. Now this issue is fixed.

Pending changes view: The differences shown for a replaced item that was moved too showed only the content instead of the differences with the previous loaded revision. Fixed.

Visual Studio Package: The second time the user clicked on the "Show pending changes view" context menu option of the Branch Explorer, no action was executed. This context menu option is only available when right-clicking on a checkout changeset. Fixed.

Web UI: The calculation of the repositories activity graph that appears in the home page (the one that lists repositories) has been fixed. The information was correct but there was a wrong condition that lead to long periods without updating the data shown.

That's all for now. Enjoy!

Partial replica

Thursday, June 06, 2013 Pablo Santos distributed 0 Comments

I’m working on a big repo and want to continue working on my laptop, maybe while traveling, but I’d like to avoid a full clone of the entire repo for size or time issues.

I’d just like to have a “working copy” but able to checkin, branch from it, and eventually replicate the parts I didn’t get when I setup the repo.

This is the reason why we implemented “partial replica” back in 2010 when we jumped from Plastic 3 to 4.

(Note: we changed from “item level” merge-tracking to “changeset-level” merge-tracking which greatly simplified some aspects and opened new doors).

Replica goes branch by branch

In Plastic when you replicate a branch you replicate “just this branch” you selected, so all replicas are “partial” unless you select all the branches in the original repo.

Look at the following example where I’ll be replicating from the “London” server to the “Stockholm” one. In the original server I have 3 branches but in reality in Stockholm today I’m only interested on “branch2”. What can I do?

Pablo Santos

I'm the CTO and Founder at Códice.
I've been leading Plastic SCM since 2005. My passion is helping teams work better through version control.
I had the opportunity to see teams from many different industries at work while I helped them improving their version control practices.
I really enjoy teaching (I've been a University professor for 6+ years) and sharing my experience in talks and articles.
And I love simple code. You can reach me at @psluaces.

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.445 External Release is out!!

Monday, June 03, 2013 Luix 0 Comments

Plastic SCM 4.1.10.445 (Bologna) is available now!

You can check the full list of changes here and visit the Plastic SCM download page to install or upgrade your Plastic SCM setup.

You can suggest and vote new features on the Plastic SCM Forum page and tell us your opinion about Plastic SCM or use the User's Voice channel, as well.

Lots of issues suggested in our User's Voice system available now!!