Tuleap 11.10 and 11.11 January & February 2020

Brand new project creation

The creation of a new project is not being done very frequently. Yet it’s one of the very first step most of users are doing when they discover Tuleap. It’s critical in user on-boarding and users deserve an A+ experience when doing it.

The first thing you will notice is the fresh look, but the main change is in templates. The new Tuleap templates have been designed to jump start easier.

There are four Tuleap templates:

• Agile ALM (Tuleap Enterprise Edition only). The most complete template to build quality software. You will get a pre-configured workspace for enterprise scale scrum, version control, test management and documentation.
• Scrum. The famous Agile methodology
• Kanban. Flow oriented activity management
• Issue Tracking. A Github/lab like template: a repository, a tracker, simple and efficient.

Once the template is selected, a few more information are required before getting started. Of course it leverages all the Tuleap project creation constraints defined by the site administrator (mandatory fields to ease classification in big organisations) but most platforms will only need a title and whether the project is public or not.

And voilà, you get started right away (or you wait for your beloved admin to approve your project).

Final word, all new platforms get the new project creation flow by default. The existing ones can opt-in with a site administration feature flag with tuleap config-set force_new_project_creation_usage 1

Product Backlog Management: backlog refinement made easy

When a (Scrum) backlog grows, it can be hard to distinguish what’s currently well defined and ready to be started (see Definition of Ready) and what still need discussion.

A common way to manage this is to leverage Kanban in addition to Scrum. A Kanban of User Stories for the backlog grooming and when a given maturity is reached, the stories can go into the Scrum Backlog for future development scheduling.

To ease that usage, Tuleap introduces the concept of “Explicit Backlog Management”. It is opposed to the “automated” way, where all user stories appear in the Scrum Backlog regardless of its maturity/readiness.

When you activate the “Explicit Backlog Management” in the admin, the project stories won’t appear automatically in the Scrum Backlog anymore. In order to add them, you will have to either:

• Create the story directly from the Top Backlog
• At the story level, in the tracker, use the action menu to “Add to Top Backlog” (masse change available too)
• Create a new automation in the workflow with a post action “Add to Top Backlog”

For instance, you can create a “User Stories Kanban” with a post-action in the workflow that will add your stories in the Scrum Backlog when the status is set to “Ready for Implementation”.

See the documentation   for more details about the different ways of configuration.

New widget to track Project Milestones

(Tuleap Enterprise Edition only)

This new widget gives a high level view of project’s on-going releases. It’s handy to keep track of milestones without having to deep dive into the agile dashboard.
To enjoy this new widget, install and activattuleap-plugin-projectmilestones rpm

TaskBoard: update assigned-to & new default

(Tuleap Enterprise Edition only)

For Tuleap Enterprise Edition users, TaskBoard is the new default Scrum board. It’s now stable and complete enough to replace the good old Cardwall .

In addition to classical bug fixing and polishing post general availability (like rewriting our own drag’n drop library), we’ve added the edition of “Assigned to” field on the right of the card.

Git: use Access Key instead of username/password

When Tuleap is setup with a SSO mechanism like OpenID Connect, there is no need to store a password associated to the user. Until now it meant that usage of Git was limited to ssh. With an Access Key, you can now use Git over https as well. It can be handy for Continuous Integration too.

You can get your Access Key in your user profile settings.

Support of Azure Active Directory authentication

In addition to standard OpenID Connect Client authentication support, Tuleap now supports Microsoft Azure Active Directory as a provider.