A client of mine is trying to have all software tracked by his Configuration Management System, IBM Rational Synergy. He wants to track one of his applications, based on several nsfs. I couldn't find anything on the Interwebs about this.
Do you have an idea of how to link a Notes application to a configuration management system? I'm kinda stumped.
I studied this with an expert in IBM Rational Synergy. The only way that seems practical to me would be to use a special plug-in which they have developped. But I wouldn't want to fiddle around with the Domino Designer either.
They also talked of the possibility of saving 'snapshots' of the design (i.e. save ntfs of the design on a regular basis), but I was recalcitrant to use that since really Notes Databases should always be in a notes-controlled environment.
Bottom line, IBM Rational Synergy does not look like a good fit for doing source control management of Notes Databases. I would definitely go with Subversion or even better with git.
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Is there any free downloadable test management tool for Windows 7.
I do not want to use any web-based tool where-in I have to sign-up.
All of the test management tools and bug trackers I've used (SpiraTest, Quality Center, Jira) have been web-based. My personal opinion on test management tools, for a lone / single tester, is that they are often too complex and too restrictive to be useful. Sure you can link requirements to tests but you have to input everything into a requirements section, then link it to each test set. Seems much easier to just create a matrix or two in Excel and track your coverage.
All test management tools also seem to think its possible to record your tests in a simple step by step manner with expected and actual results. I personally find this type of system to be too restrictive. A good test design may not yield itself to simple step by step instructions.
Having a good bug tracker that you and your development team can use is an excellent idea. There are lots of free / cheap options however they are all also web-based. Bugzilla is free and takes a bit of time to setup, however you can probably find a free VM somewhere which will get you up and running quickly (Google around). Trac is a free wiki of sort with some bug reporting abilities. SpiraTest is cheap - like $50 for a single user and has test managment and bug tracking capabilities, although if you have a few developers you'll want a larger license that may cost upwards of $200/300.
I personally like Jira and Atlassian's software. I'm playing around with Jira, Confluence and Bonfire for my testing. I can create wikis, etc. for my test ideas in Confluence, report bugs in Jira and use Bonfire for exploratory testing. If you want to host the software yourself (install it on VMs on your machine) Atlassian has this really cool deal called Starter for just $10/each item.
My experience has taught me that having a web-based bug tracking tool is a must have but Test Management tools tend to be a waste. However I encourage you to look around and explore. Most, if not all, of these tools have trial programs. You'll have to sign up / register but that's the cost of doing business. Wikipedia has this list on Test management Tools so have at it.
I work in a shop that's adopted TFS for source control. We're happy with the integration in VS and the other features it offers, so it's likely we're not going to switch to another platform. However, features for team collaboration and documentation are lacking compared to other solutions, most notably SVN + Trac.
Has someone been able to integrate TFS 2010 with TRAC?
EDIT:
It's been asked that I clarify my intent here. It's very simple. I'm just asking if the TRAC project management and bug/tracking system can be used in conjunction with TFS. And, if so, what would it take?
Remember, I'm not looking for a Sharepoint solution--I've already got that. I'm asking if it's possible that TRAC and TFS can get along.
(Long rambling clarification on what I'm looking to get out of TRAC removed. The question is simply "Can TRAC work with TFS?")
Not so much of a trouble a the Trac side. There is FOSS everywhere, a lot of modularity and flexibility. No quite the same at the other side. I've read about the trouble even with one-time migration from SVN to TFS. Despite the source is all open and well documented, there no evidence of good support, that should tell you much about the chance for getting even more - constant synchronization.
Facts: MS SQL server is the base for TFS. No connector available for MS SQL server as a Trac db backend, although there are several python bindings to MS SQL server available, or the option to connect via ODBC. But just an option, nothing ready AFAIK.
I'm not aware of any well documented open TFS API as foundation for migration and integration. And I'm not convinced this will ever change. At Redmond (Microsoft) they are reportedly only considering what seems important to themselves: "helping customers with IBM Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest tools." And most probably it this behavior will persist and SVN/Trac keeps very low on the ToDo for them.
[Edit2]
While TFS has some support for bidirectional communication, these scenarios are not recommended. It mostly aims at integration, read: sucking information in, not communicating with other information systems like Trac.
[Edit]
Just for sub-task of repository browsing you could try to write code to push a duplicate of changes to another (SQLite|MySQL|PostgreSQL) repo that Trac supports right now. But I consider this is rather wasteful and ugly, and fact remains, that it's hard, if possible at all, to do the same tracking without such big code duplication. Ultimately, if you want to live without the actual check-in source changes you must at the very least send information about the meta-data like resource ID's (for link generation) to find the data in TFS.
I'm looking into that right now. So take the following as half-educated advise to the best of my knowledge and feel free to correct/discuss.
I've been programming in .NET professionally for three years and am always looking to sharpen my tools. I'm a sole developer for a company that recently purchased a MSDN subscription along with Visual Studio 2008 Professional. In what ways can the subscription be useful?
I'm used to googling 80% of the day to figure out how to do what I want to do, and I've learned a ton that way. I'm having trouble seeing what the subscription gains me.
An MSDN subscription provides much more than simply an offline version of their documentation. You get access to nearly all relevant software that Microsoft makes including Windows, SQL Server, Office, etc. It also includes previous versions, as well as versions that are not yet released to the public.
It's great for testing, developing for a new platform, and for learning about new features in other Microsoft products in which you may not normally be exposed to.
The MSDN subscription isn't necessarily about access to documentation but it gives you a few key pieces of functionality.
Software licenses for Visual Studio, Office, Windows, etc.
Technical Support Incidents - For when you can't answer the question
MSDN Magazine Subscription (Yes you can get this outside of this as well)
I'm sure that there are some other things, but the license and support benefits are by far the "reasons" to have a MSDN subscription.
If you really want to grow your ability as a .NET developer the best way is to spend time around other developers using the same toolset. There are just too many tools in the .NET environment to experience them all yourself. Especially since you don't have other co-workers explorering the .NET environment with you.
If I were you, I'd check the web for any .NET user's groups located near you and attend their meetings. Those can be great places to pick up new ideas/ways of using the tools.
Among other things you get a license for Visual Studio and Office. You also get access to a wide range of operating systems and applications you may use to test your own software. For instance you may want to test your software on different versions of Windows, or if you develop software for Exchange Server you probably need to install this product without having to buy a full production license just to be able to develop software.
As it is included in the license (according to SAP) we would prefer using Solution Manager over other tools, for the entire life-cycle of software development. Or is it highly recommended to use specific tools for the particular processes like Test Management? Any opinions?
in general before answering this question, please be aware that SAP will bring out a new support model and the features and functions available in your SolMan installation will differ according to the support you requested from SAP. If you stick to the Enterprise Support you will (nearly) get every functionality, for Standard Support you well get less and a lot of features will not be included. At the moment, SolMan 7.10 is in Ramp Up Phase and 7.20 will be released in 2011. Due to the fact, that SAP changes the kernel of the Solution Manager Stack, which is apparently CRM from 5.0 to 7.0 you should keep in mind, that any functionality you implement in your current SolMan will lead to high migration efforts.
Apart from this, if you look at the Enterprise version, my experience is that not all features are rather good and suitable. It also depends on the organization you are working in. The SAP tools focus only on SAP, so if you are working in an environment where non-SAP Java has an important part I would look for different tools. If you look into the change management (ChaRM), it is suitable for small landscapes and for big ones only with some effort. Here you should also consider at least to have a look at different technologies and tools. From my point, there are some things like monitoring, job scheduling etc. which are quite good, but for the more general application lifecycle management tools you should at least take other options into account.
My development group uses Visual Source Safe for version control; this choice was originally made due to cost and its tight integration with Visual Studio.
As our repository has grown Source Safe has really started to show its limitations and we are considering moving to another solution. Up for discussion are Team Foundation Server, Subversion, Git, and Mercurial.
We are largely a data shop, so another major factor for us is being able to easily version SQL Server 2005/2008 projects. This is one of the benefits of using Source Safe, and also of Team Foundation Server - the integration with Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.
I'm wondering if anyone has had experience versioning SQL Server with Subversion, Git, or Mercurial and can provide some solid pros/cons for each of these systems, as well as how you went about implementing them.
My honest answer is don't do any integration with your database tooling and SCM if you can avoid it. Use the filesystem where possible. It's another layer of integration which is going to be a pain. Small separate tools are better than a behemoth.
We use Subversion and SQL 2005 together in the following manor:
We use TortoiseSVN only. No VS/SSMS integration at all.
We have a principle of "automate everything", so we never rely on GUI tools to do work.
We keep all scripts inside SVN along with the code. The code, schema and scripts are versioned together.
Schema changes are numbered in order of application i.e. 000-create-table-users.sql. We write down the maximum script number deployed in each environment. Each script performs a migration to the next database r number. When we deploy, we check out the source and run all scripts from the last version number to the highest number.
Any non-schema scripts (sprocs/views) are idempotent (can be executed any number of times with the same result). They are applied via a nant plugin we wrote. These are replaced every time we deploy. Don't forget to refresh your views!
We avoid any scripts where possible anyway as we use NHibernate so there are less problems with script versioning anyway.
From this structure, we can re-create the environment and database at any point in time on any machine which is important.
We do NOT use it for unit testing however - we rely on the NHibernate schema generation to do this on top of an SQLite database.
The only negative point we've encountered has been making sure that developers adhere to the process. Herding cats is a very appropriate description.
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition (codename "DataDude") is what you need.
It allows you to version your database objects in ways that will blow your mind. (eg upgrade a customer site to a specific version, or rollback to a previous version without destroying any data).
Check out the features at Gert Drapers' blog, starting with this post.
Or if you prefer a podcast, listen to DotNetRocks with Chris Sells in show 494.
I don't know whether you're limited to TFS for source control, when using DataDude -- but it is the undeservedly "underhyped" member of the Visual Studio family.
This might be a useful tool for you:
http://www.liquibase.org/
It's designed so that it's easy to version control in any system, and manages your upgrade scripts in a sane way.
Git and Mercurial are the only ones you should consider IMHO, the other 2 are too old-fashioned. Modern SCMs should treat branches like git does.
For git vs. mercurial comparisons see:
http://rg03.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/mercurial-vs-git/, http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/distributed-revision-control-systems-git-vs-mercurial-vs-svn.
I have no past experience with SSMS SCM integration though, but AFAIK neither of the systems mentioned (except from TFS) have one. I wouldn't call it a disadvantage tho - git GUI for example is a pretty handy tool, which you'll find more enjoyable than such an integration. This is at least my case when moving from SVN (with VS integration using Ankh) to Git (with no integration at all)...
Mercurial has VS integration with VisualHG, if you think DVCS is the way to go. We use that for C++/C# projects in our shop, and it works well enough. (OTOH, I've never used any "full" integration, so I'm happy to work with the explorer extension and/or command-line for detailed VC work.)
We've now added VSS support to SQL Source Control, which integrates with SSMS to provide fully integrated source control for database development. To try this out, please visit:
http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBoard/viewtopic.php?t=12265
TFS is missing a few features of VSS, notably keyword expansion. If you don't embed revision keyword info within your source files, then it should not be a concern.
There are potentially quite a number of alternatives - SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) supports integration with any Microsoft Source Code Control Interface MSSCCI Provider. So you can broaden the search to source control systems that feature an MSSCCI compatible provider.
In SSMS, Check out Tools -> Options -> Source Control to see what provider plug-ins are installed on your system.
For example, Team Foundation Server's integration with SQL Management Studio is courtesy of the TFS MSSCCI Provider. I think there's a provider for CVS/Subversion ("Aigenta Unified SCC") and so on.
As to a pros/cons list, I think provided there's a compatible provider, you can open the question up to a wider audience. My main experience is with VSS, TFS and Subversion. It really comes down to your team, and environment. Can you elaborate more on your environment?
E.g.
would you be interested in establishing CI (continuous integration)?
automated builds/automated versioning?
support for multiple environments?
configuration management?
what team size do you have? likely to have lots of merges/branching etc?
do you have a bug tracking system in place already (you get work items/bug tracking as part of a TFS roll out)?