I continue posting customers' survey result. One of the question was about integration abilities usage of TargetProcess. Here are the results.

	Very Important	Never used
CSV Import/Export	40%	37%
VS 2008	47%	42%
JIRA	11%	78%
Bugzilla	15%	72%
TestTrack Pro	2%	85%
Selenium	20%	70%
NUnit	38%	44%
Subversion	57%	39%
Perforce	4%	87%
Source Safe	9%	80%

As you see, TestTrack Pro, Perforce and SourceSafe integrations almost not used (waste of time from our side?), while Visual Studio 2008 and Subversion integrations are popular.

It seems further integrations should focus on IDEs and testing tools (Fitnesse, Eclipse).

Today we've released v.2.11. It has some nice features and the major are:

Navigation flows
Already mentioned in previous post. It is a great help for novice users to become familiar with TargetProcess. Also it may works nicely as an alternative navigation.

Selenium and NUnit integration
Automated acceptance testing integration is a long awaited feature. Integration as usual implemented via plugins and it is really easy to add integration with any testing framework that may provide results in parseable format.

Getting Started area
Nothing to add. Contains useful information about TargetProcess usage.

Sample project generation
It is easier to learn the system when it has some real data. Now you may generate sample project and examine all reports, lists, etc.

Also with v.2.11 we are providing source code of all plugins under BSD license. You are free to modify and change them to fit your needs. They will be available for download next week.

More information about v.2.11

In the current iteration we are working on NUnit and Selenium integration. In fact it is almost completed. The integration implemented as a plugin. It is possible to configure profile for each project and in general the plugin is ready for continuous integration support.

The idea is very simple. CC server puts NUnit result file in some location, TargetProcess grabs it, parses it, creates new test plan run and sets passed/failed results for all test cases in this test plan. Thus you will have complete test cases run history without any manual actions.

The one potential problem is how to map Tests from NUnit or Selenium to Test Cases in TargetProcess. There will be several possible ways:

1. Test cases may have the same names as tests. For example, TheOnePlusTwo in NUnit and The One Plus Two in TargetProcess.
2. Tests may have test case ID as a part of the name. For example, TheOnePlusTwo_1876 test relates to test case with id 1876
3. It is possible to use the regular expressions to define the test name pattern. For example, TheOnePlusTwoTest in NUnit and The One Plus Two in TargetProcess.

You may wonder why we integrated with NUnit. The main reason is that Selenium has a nice Remote Control test tool. You write tests on your favorite language, for example C#, and run the tests using NUnit. We were looking for Selenium integration and NUnit integration is just a nice side-effect :)

We've almost finished web services API implementation for TP 2.3 release. It looks quite powerful and provides huge integration capabilities. With web services API you may do almost anything: add, edit and delete new entities, retrieve entities and even execute custom queries based on HQL (Hibernate Query Language). Of course you need to know HQL syntax (close to SQL in fact) and understand TargetProcess domain model to create complex queries. So we share entities description, class diagrams and NHibernate mapping files. You may check Web Services Developers Guide (PDF - 0.4M) for details.

Here are some examples that shows web services abilities.

Add new bug into TargetProcess.

BugServiceWse bugService = new BugServiceWse();
TpPolicy.ApplyAutheticationTicket(bugService, "admin", "admin");

BugDTO bug = new BugDTO();
bug.Name = "New bug";
bug.CreateDate = DateTime.Today;
bug.Description = "Bug Description";
bug.ProjectID = 1;
            
int bugId = bugService.Create(bug);

Console.WriteLine(bugId);

Add comment to existing user story.

UserStoryServiceWse service = new UserStoryServiceWse();
TpServicePolicy.ApplyAutheticationTicket(service, "admin", "admin");
int storyId = 98;

CommentDTO comment = new CommentDTO();
comment.Description = "New Comment";

int commId = service.AddCommentToUserStory(storyId , comment);

Exampe with complex HQL query. Select all user stories assigned to user

string userName = "admin";
string userPassword = "admin";
UserStoryServiceWse userStoryService = new UserStoryServiceWse();
TpServicePolicy.ApplyAutheticationTicket(
userStoryService, userName, userPassword);

string hqlAssignedUserStoryQuery =
@"from UserStory as us where us.UserStoryID in 
       (select team.Assignable.AssignableID from Team as team 
            where team.User.UserID = ? 
            and team.Actor = us.EntityState.Actor 
            and team.Assignable.AssignableID = us.UserStoryID)";
UserStoryDTO[] stories = userStoryService.Retrieve(
hqlAssignedUserStoryQuery, new object[] {users[0].UserID});

With TP 2.2 release general project management and QA areas will be covered quite good in TargetProcess. Of course there are many, many things to improve and we will work on continuous improvements through iterations, however we have a new strategic goal — company wide operations support. In general there will be four areas that will be supported in TP 2.3 and TP 2.4:

1. Peoples management (in traditional PM science it is called Resources Management, but we don't want to use term 'resources' when working with people)
2. Integration needs (public Web Services API)
3. Programs management
4. Custom process needs (terminology support)

In TP 2.3 we will focus on first and second areas, while in TP 2.4 on third and fourth.

Peoples management

There are several questions that top managers (who are in charge for allocations) asks quite often:

• Who will be available for upcoming project?
• When developer A will be free for upcoming project?
• Who is overloaded?
• Who can be re-allocated without huge negative impact on project?

We hope that TargetProcess will provide answers on all these questions (or information that will be used to ask proper person). If you feel that you need something like that and have specific requirements, leave your comments.

Integration

Public API is a must-have for any life-cycle management system. There are so many third-party tools, in-house applications and data import/export needs. Such integration can't be done without public API.