Agile Project Management Across Organizational Boundaries with JIRA and VersionOne

In this screencast Jerry Odenwelder walks us through the issue tracking integration between Atlassian's JIRA and VersionOne. VersionOne is a hosted, Agile project management tool for development teams. The idea of the integration is to take defects, bugs, requests, and other "issues" from JIRA and tightly integrate them into the Agile project management workflow provided by VersionOne.

We start out by describing the Agile project management approach of bundling up issues into short "sprints" that development and QA teams work on when evolving software. What's interesting about the scenarios Jerry shows us is how they show issues moving across organizational boundaries during the issue's life-cycle. In the first stage of an issue's life the help-desk takes an issue into JIRA, probably a bug or request. The JIRA/VersionOne integration then sucks that issue into VersionOne where the development team can prioritize and work on the issue. Once the team is done, the issue is kicked back up to JIRA where the help-desk (or whoever) can do the proper accounting to make sure customers are happy.

As Jerry notes, the integration is free and open source, available for download in the next few weeks.

As a viewing note, be sure to view the fullscreen version of the podcast for a higher resolution version.

Disclaimer: Atlassian sponsored this screencast.

Eclipse EMF Demo – A complete modeling platform for Java

Coté talks with Ed Merks about the Eclipse Modeling Framework project, or EMF. Ed gives us a quick overview of the framework and new features and then walks us through designing a model in EMF, generating code, and then round-tripping back and forth. Watching the demo you can see how EMF could be used to create data models at the begining of a project and then maintain them throughout.

There is a larger version of the video available, as well as a larger Flash version.

Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) Demo

Cote talks with John Graham about the newest version of the Eclipse Data Tools Platform, or DTP, in Eclipse Europa. John shows us how to use DTP as database navigator, goes over the platform offerings for establishing connections and extracting models for various data sources, and then shows us some helpful DbUnit integration that DTP provides.

There’s a larger Flash version available, as well as a larger video.

Europa Mylyn Demo – Task Management and Context Filtering for Teams

Coté talks with Mik Kersten of the Eclipse Mylyn team about the most recent version of Mylyn (formally Mylar) in Eclipse Europa. In a brief video segment, Mik gives us a quick overview of Mylyn’s goals as a task and “task context” plugin to Eclipse. Mylyn integrates with issue and task tracking applications like BugZilla, trac, and Rally, giving Eclipse users a normalized and team-driven GUI for task management. Tightly-linked to tasks is the idea of creating and managing “task contexts” which focus your code-base and related project down to just the items related to a task. These task contexts are saved with the task and can be shared among the team to get highly-focused views of the project, cutting away the inevitable clutter that even the most successful projects encounter.

For a larger version, see the large video or the even larger Flash video.

Disclaimer: the Eclipse Foundation is client, and this screencast was sponsored by the Eclipse Foundation.

Reporting with Eclipse Europa BIRT

Cote talks with Virgil Dodson, Java Reporting Evangelist at Actuate about the new features in Eclipse BIRT. BIRT is an Eclipse project that allows you to connect to various data sources, build reports with those sources, and the UIs needed for your end-users to view those reports.

After a brief chat on the topic of BIRT and reporting in general, Virgil gives us a demo of the latest features in the upcoming BIRT 2.2.0 release.

For a larger version, check out the full size MP4 video or the larger Flash version.

This episode was sponsored by The Eclipse Foundation.

OSGi on the Server-side: Eclipse Europa Equinox Demo

In this screencast, Coté talks with Eclipse Equinox project lead Jeff McAffer about the new version of the Eclipse Equinox OSGi framework in Eclipse Europa. We see a demo of the the new server-side capabilities in Equinox and the development model used. The notion of “modules” and “components” is fast becoming an important topic in the Java world so it’s interesting to see the Eclipse platform’s framework moving from the desktop to the server.

A larger version of the MP4 video is available as well, as is a larger Flash version.

Disclaimer: Eclipse is a client and sponsored this video.