Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Are there bookmarkable tab URLs?

Hi -

I have some good news and so-so news on this one.

The good news is that you can use the tab name as the ‘view’ parameter, e.g. /projects/your_project/cards?view=My+Tab+Name

The so-so news is that the tab will not be highlighted with that single parameter. You’ll also need to specify the tab name: /projects/your_project/cards?view=My+Tab+Name&tab=My+Tab+Name

That style of bookmark will always show the up-to-date tab view.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Who can delete cards?

Olivier -

A couple of points:

• Regular team members cannot delete cards. The help is incorrect and is fixed the for the 2.2 release.
• A card cannot be deleted because it is a tree. Remove the card from any trees and you should be able to delete. In Release 2.2 (early 2009) a card can be deleted regardless of whether it belongs to a tree.

Topic: Mingle API / API for Exporting a Project?

Hank – Unfortunately, this API does not exist. If you are looking for a backup strategy, we actually do not recommend project export as a means of backup. We recommend backing up the DB and the ‘data’ directory using standard DB and filesystem backup tools.

Topic: Mingle Bug Reports / [As Designed] Card defaults not working from Add with detail...

In Mingle 2.2, due very early next year, both ‘Add’ and ‘Add with Detail’ will be completely decoupled from filters. Defaults, and only defaults, will always be applied.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Project variable in burn-up definition

Matt -

You need to specify an x-labels-end parameter. Also, your ‘labels’ parameter is a card property but you’re charting against dates. That mismatch will typically cause your chart to not work. However, with dates, you should be able to eliminate this parameter altogether if you specify both x-label-start and x-label-end.

Topic: Mingle Bug Reports / Return to wrong page after bulk action

Hi Adrian -

This is an unfortunate consequence of the fact that this navigation is managed in the user session and firefox tabs share the same user session. Apologies for the inconvenience caused by this.

Topic: Troubleshooting Installation of Mingle / Can't send email either

Mingle supports plain and TLS authentication. If a user name is entered, any text entered in user and password fields will be sent via plain authentication unless you check the TLS box. Not setting a username will result in no authentication being used. We will take note to make that page less confusing.

To see which Windows user Mingle is running as, goto the Services Control Panel and look at the ‘Log On’ tab for the Mingle service. You can use that tab to change the user that Mingle runs as.

Topic: Troubleshooting Installation of Mingle / ajp support in mingle

glad you were able to get this running. i can confirm that a large number of production mingle instances are using apache2+ajp so you should experience no problems with this setup.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Tree Structure Strategy

Hi Nodje -

Mingle intentionally does not impose a methodology upon you. The ThoughtWorks experience is that a well-functioning team will quickly and regularly adapt its process as it learns. If you use a template, we fully expect that you will immediately make changes to the template. In most of the successful implementations we’ve seen in the field, teams abandon the templates altogether and use Mingle’s customization and configuration to build a project that maps to their specific process and language.

If there are any specific Mingle issues we can help you with, please post them to the forum and we’ll do our best to help you. We do hope that we can help you figure out whether Mingle is the correct tool for you and your team as quickly as possible. However, I must point out that while Mingle does use wiki concepts, it is certainly not a wiki. In areas such as tracking and reporting Mingle provides much, much more than a wiki. However, Mingle would lose if compared as a wiki tool to other wiki tools.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Tree Structure Strategy

Kimball -

I am afraid to say that I mostly do not understand your post. What might be helpful is if you could provide some concrete scenarios that you are unable to implement.

In the meantime, I can answer what I think are a few of your questions (some of which you likely already know, but I’ll write anyway):

• A child card can have as it’s parent any type above it in the configuration. So, if you have a Story > Scenario > Task tree configuration, a task can belong either a Story or a Scenario. Task is not limited to Scenario and Root as parent.

• However, the above is only helpful when the card types in question logically belong in the same tree. If you wanted to track Epic > Feature > Story for purposes of feature planning and Story > Defect for purposes of quality tracking, you would need to setup 2 different trees. You cannot accomplish those two sets of relationships with a single tree. On the positive side, it is possible to use MQL to do a bit of cross-tree reporting and, say, map defects to an Epic or Feature based upon the fact that you’re tracking the Story > Defect relationship. There should be no need to duplicate relationships.

• Also, while a populated tree is indeed a hierarchical structure, I reckon ‘Inheritance hierarchy’ is not the correct metaphor to describe Mingle trees.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Data series chart is stale - won't refresh

Matt & Joe -

The chart images are actually not cached on the server. Each time you request a chart image the server re-generates the image from the latest data. This is not an issue with server-side caching of rendered content. I would double check that the MQL snippets you are using as ‘conditions’ and ‘data’ criteria are actually finding the cards you expect. If you are using Mingle 2.1 you can use the ‘Advanced Filter’ on Card List page to test your MQL.

Also, the re-cache frequency settings your refer to are actually seconds and not minutes. The default is for all cached tables and values to be re-cached every 20 seconds if a card has been updates or the project structure has changed. But as this is a chart, server-side caching is not the issue. As stated above please test your MQL.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Project variable in burn-up definition

Matt & Joe -

The chart images are actually not cached on the server. Each time you request a chart image the server re-generates the image from the latest data. This is not an issue with server-side caching of rendered content. I would double check that the MQL snippets you are using as ‘conditions’ and ‘data’ criteria are actually finding the cards you expect. If you are using Mingle 2.1 you can use the ‘Advanced Filter’ on Card List page to test your MQL.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Bulk tree removal

Hi Adrian -

Not that it helps you right now, but 2.2 will allow deletion of cards that belong to trees.

Topic: Mingle Bug Reports / Mingle Users Come With Project Exports

Hi Joe -

This is already fixed for the 2.2 release due out in mid-December. Sorry for any inconvenience in the meantime. Part of the fix will be the ability to delete users imported in this very scenario, so long as they never participated in any project’s history.

Topic: Mingle Bug Reports / card revision/comment ages are incorrect

Hi Rob -

We’ve never seen this problem, therefore there is nothing in 2.1 that explicitly fixes this issue.

• Timestamps in the project-specific cards and card_versions tables
• Server system time

If those all look correct, please file a support ticket at http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-agile-project-management/support-requests

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Tree Associations

Hi Scott -

If the story>task relationships are identical between the two trees, one option would be to track the relationship in only 1 of the trees, as you should be able to accomplish all of the same reporting by managing only the single relationship.

Let’s suppose you only managed story > task in the release>iteration>story>task tree.

For aggregating task data at the project level (using aggregate properties), you could aggregate to the story level first and then use the project>story relationship in the other tree to create aggregate properties at the project level.

For MQL reporting, you can easily jump across trees to reporting on tasks from a project card. Here’s a snippet of MQL that will find all tasks belong to a project via a ‘jump’ across trees:

{{ table query: SELECT number, name WHERE Type = Task AND Story IN (SELECT Number WHERE Type = Story AND Project = THIS CARD) }}

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / MQL Self Reference

Hi -

This feature is available in the latest release of Mingle (2.1). Your query would look like this:

{{ table query: SELECT number, name WHERE type = Task and story = THIS CARD }}

There’s more about the 2.1 release here

Topic: Mingle Bug Reports / Error renaming card property

The bug is that rename fails whenever there is an unfiltered history subscription, i.e., one that sends an email on every single page, card & revision event in a project. This issue is fixed in the 2.1 release that ships next week. In the meantime, unfortunately, you will need to delete these unfiltered subscriptions in order for the rename to proceed. The following SQL will delete those subscriptions:

DELETE FROM history_subscriptions WHERE filter_params IS NULL;

If you want to continue to receive email for all project events, a workaround is to setup one subscription for all card events and another for all page events.

As stated earlier, next week’s 2.1 release fixes this bug.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Project Variables as List for MQL "WHERE IN" Queries

Unfortunately, this cannot be done right now. If ‘Done Development’ is your final status , you might save some typing by using: SELECT State, COUNT WHERE State >= “Ready for Development”

(I realize that “Done Development” is likely not your final status and you likely have something like ‘Accepted’ or ‘Deployed’ but I thought I’d throw that out there anyway.)

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Project variable in burn-up definition

Hi Andy -

Unfortunately, it is not possible to use MQL as the x-labels-start/end parameter values. Also, unfortunately, this capability will not be included in the 2.1 release.

-David

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / How do I draw a burn down chart?

Mingle supports the ability to draw a line chart, counting down from a SUM, with a trend line. Suppose a project where you are:

• Tracking a story as finished when ‘Story Status’ = Closed
• Measuring work using an ‘Estimate’ property
• You’re currently in Release ‘2.1’ which started on 2008-07-01
• Tracking progress against days, and are therefore tracking the closing date, with a ‘Closed On’ date property

You could then use the following markup for burn down chart:

{{ 
  data-series-chart
    conditions: Type = Story and Release = 2.1
    cumulative: true
    x-labels-start: 2008-07-01
    series:
    - label: Remaining Work
      color: black
      type: line
      data: SELECT 'Closed On', SUM('Estimate') WHERE 'Story Status' = Closed
      down-from: SELECT SUM('Estimate')
      trend: true
}}

You will find many options for tweaking this chart in the ‘Macro reference’ section of the online Mingle help. And obviously you will need to chance the property names and such to match exactly how you track your work. E.g., maybe you’re tracking against iteration number of day in sprint rather than calendar date.

The trend line can only be calculated against the actual data in the chart. You cannot specify that a trend be brought forward from a previous data set to draw the trend line for the current data set. You can specify that the trend calculation only consider the X most recent data points if, e.g., you might consider that the last 30 days of your project is a more accurate representation of how the team is trending than the entire data set.

I need a bit of clarification as to what you’re asking about a velocity line. My experience with ‘velocity’ is that it reflects the actual pace at which a team is delivering. As actual pace is never a fixed thing, I don’t understand how this would be a fixed line. Did you mean that for a burndown covering a 2 week sprint/iteration/cycle, you’d rather have a trend line that reflects the previous N sprints/iterations, as 2 weeks is not a good sample size for a trend line? In that case, unfortunately, Mingle cannot ‘bring forward’ a trend calculation from one data set in order to predict another data set. But what you can easily do is a release-level burndown that rolls up to the sprint/iteration level in order to handle that scenario.

As all agile teams work differently, there will not be a single style of burndown chart or tracking that suits everyone. Mingle attempts to meet a team’s need to work in its own style, by offering a certain degree of flexibility. You may find that this leaves our charts requiring a bit more tweaking than you’d like. It’s a trade-off that might not work for everyone. There will be features in coming releases allowing pluggable and user-defined macros that address the issue of allowing a team to work in its own unique style and still markup charts using a higher-level language than what we have now.

Topic: Mingle Bug Reports / Error while processing import

We’ve seen this error when people manually delete cards from the DB. If you did this, you need to either clean up the database for the original project and re-run the export or cleanup the export files that you have.

To cleanup the database, suppose a project identifier of ‘foo’ and a project id (in DB) of 10:

DELETE FROM tree_belongings WHERE card_id NOT IN (SELECT id FROM foo_cards) AND tree_configuration_id IN (SELECT id FROM tree_configurations WHERE project_id = 10);

I would highly recommend that, in order to see what you’ll delete, you run a debug version of that delete statement first:

SELECT * FROM tree_belongings WHERE card_id NOT IN (SELECT id FROM foo_cards) AND tree_configuration_id IN (SELECT id FROM tree_configurations WHERE project_id = 10);

If you no longer have the original DB and cannot clean that up and re-run the export you will need to remove the offending rows from the export file that you have. The export file is a zip, so unzip it to start. The export format is YAML so should be fairly straightforward to understand. You will need to delete the entries from tree_belongings.yaml that correspond to the cards that you have deleted. Unfortunately, this is a bit more of a manual exercise.

There a handful of other tables in the original DB that might need cleanup, but a cleanup of tree_belongings should be enough to make project import work.

In the future, I do not recommend deleting cards from the database via SQL. If you do not see that a card can be deleted, you likely need to first drop it from any trees.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / svn 1.5

Unfortunately, Mingle does not currently work with SVN 1.5. We use SVNKit to connect to subversion. Version 1.20 of SVNKit, which will work with SVN 1.5, is still in beta. As soon as this library is available for GA we’ll have an update/announcement on Mingle and SVN 1.5.

Topic: Mingle General Discussion / Mingle version numbering scheme?

• major version increment is triggered by a significant domain change such as trees.
• minor version increment is triggered by a release with new features but no significant domain changes.
• tiny version increment is triggered by bug fixes and new plugins. in our minds, new plugins such as perforce and JA-SIG, are not new features, but simply new implementations of existing features.

Topic: Mingle Bug Reports / Mingle does not use nofollow links

Hi Folks -

I am a bit confused here. Transitions do not use GET. All transition links use javascript/onclick to fire an Ajax POST. Additionally, the Google Appliance documentation indicates that it does not index any URL contained in Javascript.

Also, to the best of our knowledge there are no GETs in Mingle that modify or delete data.