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Development Tools and Process Standardization Update

balu

Active member
Foundation Member
As previously announced, the Project Management and Delivery Excellence Initiative launched last month to address a number of issues related to project management. One of the issues identified in the original announcement was a lack of standard communication and collaboration tools.

In the recent past, the team was using a number of project management tools. These included:

  • JIRA for development tracking and bug reporting
  • Confluence for an information wiki and hosting of FAQs
  • Bamboo - a continuous integration tool used for development
To date, the team experienced mixed success using this combination of resources:

  • JIRA was effective - when it was used properly - but fell into disuse and became outdated
  • Confluence was ideal for wiki and FAQ, but there was no option to ask questions
  • Confluence also became outdated over time since there was no assigned owner or defined update process
  • Lack of a single sign-on across tools meant contributors registered for each tool separately - creating additional hurdles for those wishing to contribute
  • The platform was hosted by one community member, which posses a potential risk**
  • The tools were used by only a small subset of community members
** Note that community member flare's efforts here are deeply appreciated. Flare deployed, hosted and supported these tools for the team. We wouldn't be where we are today without his support and we only seek to improve on this initial infrastructure.

The team has spent the past couple of weeks evaluating the options to address these issues. Many considerations were made including the cost, capabilities, and ease of use of each solution, as well as the effort required to migrate existing content to new solutions. Ultimately, we are recommending a limited number of changes to the tools themselves, but significant changes in how they are managed and maintained. Retaining the existing tools will make migration to the new host low-risk and relatively quick. Here is what the Development Tools and Process Standardization Initiative recommended:

  • JIRA - an industry leading tool - will be used for assisting the development and quality assurance by organizing to-dos and prioritizing issues. It will also be open up to the public so the community can easily help in bug testing/reporting.
  • JIRA Service Desk addon will handle community submissions to the teams working on Dash, whether they be bugs, ideas, or suggestions.
  • Confluence will be used for both internal and external documentation, with the intention of improving overall project documentation, and having a central place where community members can find information.
  • Confluence Questions will be used as a place where community members can ask and answer questions about Dash. It's like a community maintained FAQ, where both team and community members can contribute by answering the questions raised. Combined with the superb search functionality of Confluence this tool can be used as the central place for distributed knowledge related to Dash.
  • Bamboo will be used by the development team for automated tests and builds
  • The entire platform will be professionally hosted by Atlassian with multiple administrators on the team to provide redundancy
Atlassian is the developer of various industry standard tools (the ones listed above and a few others), and are generous enough to give out free licenses for teams working on open-source projects (otherwise these tools would cost in our case thousands of dollars per month). If you are a programmer or project manager and haven't worked with Atlassian before, we hope that you find their solutions effective. If you wind up using them at your day job, it would be great to share with them where you first worked with their products and encourage them to continue offering these products pro bono.

The link to the new platform is: https://dashpay.atlassian.net, and sign-up is now open. All the tools (except for Bamboo, which is only relevant to core developers) will be open to public contribution. We hope that this solution not only makes the team more efficient, but we also hope to provide greater transparency and make it easier for contributors to get involved in projects, development, or addressing community questions.

We'd like to enourage everyone to use the Service Desk to submit any issues found on the platform, and use this thread to discuss how our community could benefit the most from this solution.
 
moli - no, they are completely separate. jira.darkcoin.qa, wiki.dashpay.io, bamboo.darkcoin.qa will all be shut down soon.

However, in this new platform you will need only 1 account for all the tools.
 
GREAT JOB BALU!!!!! Looking really good. I think you touched all the major points. Just wanted to personally thank you for all your hard work. If you'd ever show you face in the #dashpay irc channel I'd tip you!

All resources for dev and testing under one roof with one login. Awesome!

LOL!!!!!
Code:
13:35 -!- balu- [~molly@unaffiliated/molly] has joined #dashpay                       
13:35 -!- mode/#dashpay [+v balu-] by DashPay, DarkGuard                                                              
13:35 <@coingun> LOL                                                                                                                        
13:35 <+balu-> hi coingun here i am , TIP ME!                                                                                     
13:35 <@coingun> fucking sneaky moli sneakly                                                                                   
13:35 <+balu-> WHAT                                                                                                                          
13:36 <@coingun> 5 -!- balu- [~molly@unaffiliated/molly] has joined #dashpay                                  
13:36 <+balu-> LOL                                                                                                                              
13:36 <@coingun> balue woudln't get +v :)                                                                                          
13:36 <@coingun> !tip 1.420 balu-                                                                                                       
13:36 <+DashTip> Usage: !tip <nickname> <amount>
 
Last edited by a moderator:
haha... I witnessed that IRC live. Pretty funny ;)

Quick question... What happened to JIRA? Why/how was it misused, I don't understand... I used to report bugs. Was a bit intimidated as I am not a coder/dev, at first I was kind of shy about it but the bugs I found were quite relevant and got looked at. I always wondered why it was dropped.

Maybe a quick rule-of-thumb 1 or 2 sentence of do's and don't might help everyone get in line to use the resources better.

.
 
haha... I witnessed that IRC live. Pretty funny ;)

Quick question... What happened to JIRA? Why/how was it misused, I don't understand... I used to report bugs. Was a bit intimidated as I am not a coder/dev, at first I was kind of shy about it but the bugs I found were quite relevant and got looked at. I always wondered why it was dropped.

Maybe a quick rule-of-thumb 1 or 2 sentence of do's and don't might help everyone get in line to use the resources better.

.

Great feedback, thanks. To be honest I don't know why it was dropped in our case, but I have experience from the corporate sector. If there is no person assigned who's responsible for maintaining the board / backlog / etc, old issues will start to accumulate. And there will come a turning point when due to the chaos people are better off not using the system. And once some start not using it, others will follow very quickly.

The thing is, we have to prevent such scenarios. This is why each board created in JIRA will have a person responsible for it.

Also, about "how' the tools should be used: I could write extensive documentation, but I believe it'd be easier to create 4-5 specific short videos for the various use cases. I'll get these done this week, as currently the platform albeit being ready won't be used by the community, if nobody know what to do on it. We just decided to push it out without polishing things, and build from the feedback. (your feedback about the lack of how-to materials being the first)
 
GREAT JOB BALU!!!!! Looking really good. I think you touched all the major points. Just wanted to personally thank you for all your hard work. If you'd ever show you face in the #dashpay irc channel I'd tip you!

All resources for dev and testing under one roof with one login. Awesome!

LOL!!!!!
Code:
13:35 -!- balu- [~molly@unaffiliated/molly] has joined #dashpay                    
13:35 -!- mode/#dashpay [+v balu-] by DashPay, DarkGuard                                                           
13:35 <@coingun> LOL                                                                                                                     
13:35 <+balu-> hi coingun here i am , TIP ME!                                                                                  
13:35 <@coingun> fucking sneaky moli sneakly                                                                                
13:35 <+balu-> WHAT                                                                                                                       
13:36 <@coingun> 5 -!- balu- [~molly@unaffiliated/molly] has joined #dashpay                               
13:36 <+balu-> LOL                                                                                                                           
13:36 <@coingun> balue woudln't get +v :)                                                                                       
13:36 <@coingun> !tip 1.420 balu-                                                                                                    
13:36 <+DashTip> Usage: !tip <nickname> <amount>
LOL...
I can't pretend to be a Hungarian... lol

(I think balu is from Hungary, right? :))
 
LOL...
I can't pretend to be a Hungarian... lol

(I think balu is from Hungary, right? :))

oh! I love Hungary. That's one of the nicest countries I've ever been to. Budapest os so cool! (especially the nightlife)... I miss it there so much.

zinalg.jpg

you're lucky, balu, if you live there :wink: (sorry for the OT)
 
Yup, Budapest it is. Anyone visiting should let me know, and we could have a beer together. :)

Back to the topic:

I plan on making these 4 videos:
Bug reporting for Dash Core
Bug reporting / feature request for dashpay.io
Ask Dash related questions, and help others by answering theirs using Confluence Questions
Creating a guide in Confluence, and how it be moved to the Official Documentation

At the same time I've extended service desk to have support for bug reports and feature request for dashpay.io. fernando mentioned me earlier that he receives such requests using 4-5 communication channels, this can be consolidated into one. The backlog created this way will be public, and everyone is able to comment and vote on specific issues.

Expect more to come, step by step.
 
Yup, Budapest it is. Anyone visiting should let me know, and we could have a beer together. :)

Back to the topic:

I plan on making these 4 videos:
Bug reporting for Dash Core
Bug reporting / feature request for dashpay.io
Ask Dash related questions, and help others by answering theirs using Confluence Questions
Creating a guide in Confluence, and how it be moved to the Official Documentation

At the same time I've extended service desk to have support for bug reports and feature request for dashpay.io. fernando mentioned me earlier that he receives such requests using 4-5 communication channels, this can be consolidated into one. The backlog created this way will be public, and everyone is able to comment and vote on specific issues.

Expect more to come, step by step.
I really think we are onto something with these videos! They are really well done so far the ones I've seen.
 
I really think we are onto something with these videos! They are really well done so far the ones I've seen.

+ we have a great system for multiple languages in place !
 
I really want to start working on the Brazilian Portuguese language translation (dashpay.io and wallet), I just need to re-organise myself first, because I've been accumulating lots of tasks in parallel recently (job, dash, girls, etc).
 
Quick status update: Chinese and Russian spaces in Confluence are up with 2 maintainers each. We plan on limiting official documentation to English only, all other languages should be maintained by the community.
 
Two videos are ready. Sorry for the grammar and the pronunciation mistakes, I'm not a native English speaker.

Ask Dash related questions, and help others by answering theirs using Confluence Questions

Bug reporting / feature request for dashpay.io
 
Why we are still talking/calling Darkcoin in dashpay.atlassian.net ?

drkcoin1.png

drkcoin2.png

Because certain guides never got updated !
I asked multiple times to please update these guides here on DCT (so we have the new versions for the wiki) but no reply.

"Running Darkcoin"
No idea where that section is coming from

Will look into that later
 
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