New features in CollabNet TeamForge 8.2

Important announcements

One-hop upgrade compatibility for TeamForge 8.2

Note:

The TeamForge 8.2 installer supports one-hop upgrade from TeamForge 7.1 or later versions only.

During an upgrade, the TeamForge 8.2 migration script detects the TeamForge version you run, checks if it's TeamForge 7.1 or later, and if 'true', proceeds with the upgrade.

The migration script aborts with an error message if it detects TeamForge 7.0 or earlier versions, in which case, you must upgrade your site to TeamForge 7.1 or later first and then upgrade to TeamForge 8.2.

Note:

TeamForge 8.2 upgrade instructions are for upgrading from TeamForge 8.1 (including patch releases, if any) to TeamForge 8.2. Contact CollabNet Support if you want to upgrade from TeamForge 8.0 or earlier versions to TeamForge 8.2.

No support for Perforce integration: Perforce integration is not supported from TeamForge 8.2 and later. All Perforce related site-options.conf tokens are obsoleted and documentation removed.

No support for context-sensitive Help for sites without internet access: The HELP_AVAILABILITY and REMOTE_HELP_URL site-options.conf tokens have been removed from TeamForge 8.2 (and later). Remove these tokens from your site-options.conf file if you are upgrading to TeamForge 8.2.

No support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES): SLES platform is no longer supported. See CollabNet product end-of-life policy for more information.

Redesigned TeamForge header

The TeamForge header has been redesigned with an eye for a simplified user experience. With the dynamically changing (context-sensitive) menu header, what you now have in place of a toolbar is a consolidated set of menu options. Based on your user permissions, you can easily select/access the three main categories: your workspace, system administrator menu and your project.

Planning folder type

The planning folder creation has now been enhanced to make your project planning more organized and more agile-specific. You can now create planning folders of three different types: Release, Iteration or Folder. This enables you to compartmentalize artifacts within an even more structured planning folder hierarchy,making project planning and tracking much easier. Evidently, you can generate three different burndown charts depending upon the planning folder type. For more information about the planning folder types and the modified burndown charts, see Create a planning folder, What can I learn from a burndown chart? and Velocity and average velocity.

Note: Though having multiple planning folder types help you logically organize your planning folders, there's no hierarchical restrictions on these different planning folder types. For example, as a user, you have the liberty to create a "Release" planning folder as a child of an "Iteration" planning folder, which may not be the ideal use case in an Agile project.

Project toolbar and integration administration

Project toolbar administration has now been renamed Tools in the Project Admin Menu.
All tools are now presented in a consolidated list: core tools like Tracker and Source Code along with integrations such as IAF applications, linked applications, and Orchestrate sources.
Use the Tools menu to administer project integrations. The new "Tools" concept consolidates integration administration into a single interface for better context (e.g., ReviewBoard IAF and Orchestrate settings are consolidated on a single page).
Use the "Add Tool" function to add new integrations to your TeamForge project.

Boards

With the requisite permission, you can now do the following on the Kanban Board:

You can quickly create an artifact, including child artifacts.
While viewing closed items, use the new calendar tool to toggle between the following options:
- view artifacts that were closed in the past 60 days
- or view all of them.

All the related icons (Configure/Refresh/Show all closed artifacts/Manage Boards or Select Board) are now grouped to form a small toolbar at the top right corner of a kanban board for easy navigation.

Rank cards on Task and Kanban boards:similar to planning board, you can now drag and drop a card above or below the other cards within a swimlane to position it in the order you want the artifact addressed on the task and kanban board as well.

Retain card ranking across views:the positioning of cards is retained when you switch between the list and board views (Planning, Task and Kanban).

Tracker

'Priority', a configurable single select tracker field: the single select tracker field, 'Priority', is now a configurable field. When you create a new tracker, the default priority is set as '4 - Low'. However, you can set a different default value for this configurable single select tracker field, 'Priority', at a later point in time. See Configure tracker "Select" field values for more information.

Note: You cannot delete or disable the 'Priority' field.

Tracker search results display on Project Home page: the saved search results list (Tracker Search Results component) displayed on the Project Home page has been enhanced to reflect the column configuration changes you make in the tracker list view; that is, the column configuration of tracker search results on the Project Home page is an exact replica of the columns configured in the tracker list view. Depending on your tracker column configuration, you can now use custom fields as search criteria on your tracker or Project Home page.

Export selected list of artifacts: you can now export artifacts of your choice from the Trackers and Planning Board list views as well as the tracker search results page.

Association Viewer

The Association Viewer in code browser (introduced in 8.1) which shows associations graphically on a timeline now replaces the Associations listing in all the relevant pages (except discussion posts) of TeamForge.

Wherever an Associations tab is available, you’ll now be able to toggle between a list and a trace association view. The associations displayed include both the TeamForge native objects as well as associations with objects from third party integrated tools. The behaviour is consistent across TeamForge with the following features:

You can add/remove associations manually.
The Trace view, which displays the traceability chain of associations in a graphical format includes an artifact's parent/child dependencies as well.
The list of associations is paginated to better handle large lists of associations.

SCM

Unlike in the past, repositories created (or deleted) by site administrators and users with site wide role (with Integrations - SCM INTEGRATIONS permission) need no approval even on SCM servers that send such requests for approval to an administrator. Read more about the 'Requires Approval' feature here.

Internal code browser

Git specific changes:

A new Graph tab has been added which allows you to visually see the branching and merging history within your repository.
Deleted and rewritten branches that were protected by the History Protection feature can be seen on the Branches tab with options to resurrect or permanently delete the references.
Support for Git submodules has been added. When submodule points to a repository in TeamForge, it can be directly browsed.
When viewing a commit, the number of lines added/deleted for each file is now shown in the Summary view.
The branch comparison feature has been enhanced to show the consolidated list of changed files along with the number of lines added/deleted in each of them.

Reports

Edit reports from Project Home page: users with the appropriate permission can now edit a report from the Project Home page itself using the new Explore link available at the bottom left corner of all the reports.

Cross project tracker reports: Tracker reports can now report on data not just across multiple trackers from a single project but even across multiple trackers from multiple projects. For more information, see Table reports: Task and Tracker reports.

Orchestrate

Unlike earlier releases, with TeamForge Orchestrate 8.2 and later, you do not have to download and install the commit and tracker adapters manually. The TeamForge installer, by default, installs (or upgrades, in case you are upgrading to TeamForge 8.2) the commit and tracker adapters. In addition, TeamForge commit sources are created automatically for each project repository (Git and Subversion).
Orchestrate installation process provides helpful diagnosis and solutions for common failure modes.
Orchestrate installation provides resume functionality in case of failure.
Orchestrate commit-to-work item association style now matches TeamForge. For example, [artf1234, JIRA-1234].
Reporting API now accepts the "PIPELINE READ" permission for access.

site-options.conf

Obsolete site-options.conf tokens

The following site option tokens are obsoleted in line with CollabNet's product optimization policies. Also see: CollabNet product end-of-life policy.

PERFORCE_CLIENT_DIR
PERFORCE_GROUP
PERFORCE_LICENSE_FILE
PERFORCE_LOG_DIR
PERFORCE_PORT
PERFORCE_REPOSITORY_BASE
PERFORCE_SERVICE_CMD
PERFORCE_USER
HELP_AVAILABILITY
REMOTE_HELP_URL
EXTERNAL_TOMCAT_INSTALL_DIR
INTEGRATION_BUILTIN_TOMCAT
ETL_BUILTIN_TOMCAT
CEE_COMPATIBLE

/dev/urandom special file in JAVA_OPTS

The following JAVA_OPTS site-options.conf tokens use the /dev/urandom special file for better performance. Make sure these tokens in your site-options.conf file have -Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/urandom added to them.

Note:

Refer to the /opt/collabnet/teamforge-installer/8.2.0.0/conf/site-options-dedicated.conf file for the default values of these tokens.
The JBOSS_JAVA_OPTS site-options token has all JVM parameters but -Xms1024m and -Xmx2048m hard-coded in the TeamForge core application. You need not manually configure any other parameter (such as -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=512m -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=128M -server -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Djsse.enableSNIExtension=false -Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=600000 -Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=600000) for this token in the site-options.conf file.

Scripts

The indexupgrade.py script is no longer available.

Nexus integration

Version 2.0 of the TeamForge-Nexus integration plugin is available. Upgrade your Nexus integration plugin. See Upgrade the TeamForge-Nexus integration plugin for more information.

Bug fixes: When users log on to Nexus using CTF user credentials, the Nexus UI showed poor performance. This is fixed. You need to upgrade to "CTF-Nexus-Integration-Plugin-2.0" to get this issue fixed.

Caching with Memcached

Memcached caches Subversion (SVN) authentication and authorization information and serves the mod_authnz_ctf module's authentication and authorization requests thereby reducing the number of SOAP calls, which in turn results in less load on the TeamForge Application Server. See this wiki page for more information about Memcached.

See Install Memcached for more information about how to enable caching with Memcached.