Monday, July 20, 2009

Team Productivity Center Tutorial Published

There is now an Oracle By Example (OBE) tutorial available for TPC. It takes you through a number of topics including, on the admin side, setting up teams and integrating with repositories and, as a TPC user, querying repositories and creating relationships and tagging items across repositories.

It assumes that you have already installed or have access to TPC on the server. If not, here are instructions on doing that. The OBE includes images and examples using JIRA and MS Project Server but for a tutorial on the Rally Software integration, explore their site

And, as always, give me your feedback!

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Connecting with Team Productivity Center

Well, it's been quite a couple of weeks. TPC was featured in the developer tools section of the Fusion Middleware 11g launch and got some good press coverage (for instance eWeek) and the bloggers were our in force. You can watch the launch and see Duncan Mills use TPC in his demo. He has also recorded an Oracle Videocast and Podcast introducing TPC.

My aim is to get as many users to download and use it as possible (actually, that is every Product Manager's aim for their product!) That is going well, but I could do with your help to get the news out there. The ALM repositories we integrate with currently are all leaders in their field. The JIRA integration is a great productivity booster and the more I work with JIRA the more I realise how flexible it is. Microsoft Project Server is widely used in enterprise organisations and Rally Software is a world leader in agile development.

We are working on additional connectors (more news on that when I can divulge more) but there is always room for more. I'd love to hear from you on what ALM repositories you would like to see TPC integrate with. I'd love to hear from you if you have an internal system you would like to write a connector to integrate it with TPC. In fact, I'd love to hear from you in any capacity concerning TPC - and that, of course, includes those of you who have reported bugs too ;-)

John Stegeman, an Oracle Ace Director, is interested in creating a connector to TRAC. He announced this with a JDeveloper forum post saying, " I've been thinking about writing a connector for an issue management system that I use (of course, there had to be a selfish reason), TRAC. I think an ideal way to do this would be with a small team of developers working together on the new sample code site hosted by Oracle (http://www.samplecode.oracle.com). "

I think this is a great idea. It would be about a month of effort and you would get the opportunity not only to get to know our connector framework but to work as part of a small team and gain experience to perhaps go on to creating a connector for something within your own organisation. You can contact John through the forum post. I would highly recommend it (well, I would, wouldn't I?)

So, download, use, report, connect, and code - yep, that about covers it!

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Introducing Oracle Team Productivity Center

Today is an exciting day for me. It's the launch of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g in the USA and tomorrow the launch event comes to London. Included in this launch is, of course, Oracle JDeveloper 11gR1.

For some time I've been working on a new aspect of JDeveloper - Oracle Team Productivity Center. It is our first release of functionality to enable better Application Lifecycle Management for JDeveloper users and it is included in Oracle JDeveloper 11gR1.

TPC introduces the Team Navigator to JDeveloper. Through this navigator I can set up my team and user structure, applying team roles to users in teams/projects. I can connect to my existing ALM repositories and query/update artifacts in those repositories while working in JDeveloper.



In addition I can contextually link artifacts from different ALM repositories together - so I can create a relationship between a requirement defined in JIRA and a task in MS Project Server and I can tag items (needs a use case, ready for code review etc.) that are either visible to me or to all the members of my team. And I can be a member of multiple teams too. If I'm working on one task and am asked to switch to some other piece of code I can save the state of my development files open in the IDE against a specific work item. Work item is the generic term we give to any ALM artifact queried from an integrated ALM repository. So in the example below, I am working on a JIRA issue - SSTORE-23. If I Save Context I will save the Business Component files open in the editor along with the position and sizing of all the other JDeveloper windows. Then when I come back to this piece of work I can re-open SSTORE and Restore Context - to return my IDE to the saved state. Another great productivity booster!



A database is used to store queries, relationships, tags etc and managed by a small JEE application. This is set up by the installer and the client-side workings are downloaded through the normal Check For Updates Center in JDeveloper.

In this first release, in addition to the adaptors developed by us to connect to JIRA and MS Project Server I'm really pleased that we have partnered with Rally Software.

Rally is the leader in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) dedicated to making distributed development organizations faster and leaner by dramatically cutting the time, cost and effort needed to deliver high quality applications. Rally's products were honored with four consecutive Jolt awards (the software industry's equivalent of the Oscar® award) in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. The company's end-to-end solutions for Agile development also include Agile University, the largest source for Agile training, and Agile Commons, the largest collaborative Web 2.0 community dedicated to advancing software agility. Using the Rally Connector JDeveloper users can view and update their Rally tasks and defects directly from JDeveloper.

This release of TPC concentrates on enabling JDeveloper users, but Application Lifecycle Management is about more than just developers - it has a role in breaking down functional silos (development, QA, Doc, PM....) and it's our aim to push TPC out to more than developers going forward - both in terms of increased services provided by TPC and increasing the number of connectors available to differing ALM repositories (requirements, task, defects, testing etc)

One step towards that goal is the provision of a Connector Developers Guide and a sample connector to allow other third parties to create connectors to their existing ALM tools - be those commercial products or in-house systems.

But that's not all - JDeveloper users can also integrate their XMPP chat system into JDeveloper - even more productivity for developers without the need to leave their IDE! I can who of my team mates is connected to chat and also chat with all my buddies - whether they are working with TPC or not.

This is just a very brief introduction to Team Productivity Center. Browse the link above for more information, download, install and try it out - and let me know what you think ;-)