Archive for the ‘DrProject’ Category

I Want a Platypus Too

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Just read Elisabeth Hendrickson's posts on next-generation functional testing tools, and thought the links (her articles, plus tools she finds intriguing) would be interesting to readers of this blog. Long story short, I'm trying to figure out whether DrProject should provide support for testing, and if so, what kind and ...

DrProject 3.0 Schema

Friday, April 25th, 2008

One of the ways I can tell that DrProject is getting better is that its database schema is getting cleaner.  I've posted earlier versions from December 2006 (which was 1.0 something or other), Version 1.2 from early 2007, and the first Elixir-based version from July 2007. Today's is much tidier, ...

Design Never Ends

Friday, April 25th, 2008

You're never done designing a useful system, because if it is actually useful, people are always coming up with new requirements for it. For example, I've been using DrProject to manage my software engineering course this term: the class notes are all in the wiki (so that students can ...

Crowded House

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Google announced this year's Summer of Code projects today. I'm very pleased that six students from the University of Toronto were among the recipients: Matthew Basset / Hackystat: Hackystat Sensor for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Eran Henig / Python: Python Plugin for Web-CAT Victoria Mui / GenMAPP: Automatic (Smart) Node and ...

OK, What Would *You* Draw?

Monday, April 21st, 2008

A year and a bit ago, I posted pictures of DrProject's database schema and architecture. I'm happy with the former --- the only thing I'd do differently is make it larger and add comments (or change field names to be more descriptive) --- but the latter still bugs me.  It ...

Integration Irony

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

We've been having a problem recently with self-registration in the new version of DrProject. Would-be users fill an oh-so-familiar form (preferred ID, email address, password); their data is then held in queue for an admin to approve. However, when the admin clicks "approve", DrProject reports "user already exists in ...

Feature List

Friday, April 11th, 2008

I skipped an important step in my previous post: I wasn't explicit about the features something had to have to qualify (in my mind, if no one else's) as a "software project portal". Here are my current thoughts, sorted in order of importance. Identity management and access control (i.e., accounts, ...

Alternatives to DrProject

Friday, April 11th, 2008

We're hoping to release a new version of DrProject next week, and persuade some Trac users to upgrade. (Multiple projects! Mailing lists! Role-based access control! Scripting interface!) This is therefore a good time to take a fresh look at what other systems offer: SourceForge: not the ...

Old Dogs Are Suspicious of New Tricks

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

There was a brief flurry of email on the DrProject list this week about using JSON instead of XML for communication between clients (in our case, browsers and the occasional client-side script) and servers.  The younger members of the team were excited about the advantages: less typing, easier to read, ...

February Code Sprint: Day 1

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Yesterday was Family Day, a new Ontario holiday.  It was also the start of Reading Week (no classes at U of T), but David, Yi Qing, Luke, and Qiyu were in anyway, beavering away to get DrProject ready for PyCon while I wrote reports.  (I miss coding...)  16 new tickets ...