We recently migrated from Cognos 10.1.1 to Cognos 10.2.1.1 ( 10.2.1 plus Fix pack1) . Some of our existing reports fail validation now.
From the cogserver.log file , it looks like the BIBUS Process is Crashing on validating the report.
We are working with IBM tech support via a PMR .
Wanted to try if someone here knows if it is possible to Validate a report step by step so that I can get some information or some logs on what element in our report is exactly causing the issue? i.e. Is it possible to do the report validation in a debug mode somehow?
Oh, what a wonderful feature that would be, but to my knowledge nothing like that exists at all. You could try setting the logging on your dispatcher(s) to the maximum to see if you can get any more informative errors.
I would start by trying to view the tabular data for each query individually. If you can identify which query (or queries) are causing your problems, then you can just remove items from the query until it doesn't fail, at which point you should have a pretty good idea of what the source of the problem is.
If that doesn't work, I would just start ripping major chunks of the report out and seeing you can get it to run. For example, if you have a report with 4 charts, delete half of them and try your report. Revert back to the original report, and delete the other half. Get it to work, and then start removing stuff from the half that fails until you can narrow it down to your problem.
It's kind of slow, but these approaches have always worked for me.
On a side note, we're about to make the same upgrade, I'd be interested in hearing what you learn.
EDIT:
Oh, forgot. Make sure you disable DQM and test your reports that way, if you haven't.
Unfortunately, there's no way to debug step by step. Finally got the Core dumps for the crashes, sent them over to IBM Folks ; and they identified it as a known bug in 10.2.1.1. So now we are at 10.2.1.2 (applied Fix pack 2) which solves the issue.
My team uses the Radiator View plugin for Jenkins for fast feedback on the build status of a few different projects. One thing we discussed that would be helpful is if the SVN revision number were included in this view. After only a quick Google search, I haven't found a clear answer on whether this plugin is configurable or not; does anyone know if there's a straightforward way to add this information?
I dont think there are customizable figures there but what you can do is, pull down the source and get the revsion numbers for all the failing builds, you will have to write the code yourself, but from what I can see there is no way of doing this with the configuration options.
What you might want to try if you just need to get that information is the recent changes on the build page of the recently broken build.
Goodluck.
Can I ask why it would be helpful to have the svn revision number on display? As far as I understand it, a build radiator is supposed to 'radiate' meaningful information into the room. The svn number is fairly meaningless unless you can look up the number in the repository, in which case you could have just looked up the revision number on Jenkins anyway.
I'm just guessing, and do correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that your real desire is to have some way of quickly working out who might be responsible for a failing build. If this is the case, then processing check-in comments and displaying pictures of the users involved is a far more effective way of getting developers to react to failing builds. I've experienced this first hand at my company.
With this in mind, I have developed a standalone build radiator webapp that talks to Jenkins over its REST API. CI-Eye is trivial to set up, and will probably give you better results in the workplace than the Radiator View plug-in. Give it a try, and let me know what you think -- I'm quite actively improving it, and welcome any feedback.
CI-Eye is free and open source -- see the CI-Eye wiki for more details.
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What tips and "standards" do you use in your Redmine project management process?
Do you have a standard wiki insert template you could share or a standard way to work a project using bugs features tasks and support issues?
Do you let issues and updates get emailed into Redmine?
Do you use the forums?
Do you use SVN repository?
Do you use Mylyn in eclipse to work the task lists?
I'm trying to drag our dept. into some web based PM instead of emailed Word docs of vague requirements followed by Word docs explaining how to QA and Deploy that all get lost in a pile of competing updates and projects so that by the time I have to fix something, no one can find any documentation on how it works.
I develop and maintain internal applications for a family of manufacturing companies. As of the time of this comment, I'm the only developer/analyst on the IT team. During the worst of the recession my project demands exploded. As such my project AND issue backlog is quite unwieldy. We are currently in the process of restructuring to expand the team.
Here's how I use Redmine to keep my head straight (to the extent that is possible), my users at bay, and hopefully prevent too much hand-holding of new staff in the future.
I use Subversion for source control, with TortoiseSVN and the aptly named Tortoise-Redmine plugin. Refreshing the Repository on the Redmine project after a commit links the issue, which shows the revision on the issue, and updates my stakeholders via email notification.
I treat the project description as a means of communicating the project's purpose, scope, and lifecycle stage to those who are not involved. That way my users know what I've got on my plate, and what's still on the buffet that I'm eyeballing from a distance.
I use specific role names for my permission sets that indicate more than a set of permissions -- again, as a means of documentation. My roles include the following: Project Manager, Project Team Member, Owner, Primary User, Secondary User, Observer, Overlord (for my bosses...both fun and undeniably correct).
I use the Wiki and Documents for documentation, depending on which I feel is appropriate.
Versions are pretty much useless to me, so instead of using that for planned releases, I use it to group related issues into sprints.
I use Eric Davis's fabulous Stuff-To-Do plugin to organize/re-organize the aforementioned sprints before mass-editing the Target Versions on my issues. This also lets my stakeholders know what I'm working on and how I've prioritized their interests (for better or worse).
To encourage user interaction, I added links to the Redmine project into my applications' Help menus. The "About" box also contains a link to the Redmine project.
Future Plans
I hope at some point to finish my Visual Studio extension for Redmine integration.
Build a code library to loosely couple my application with its Redmine project: automate bug submission, alert subscribing stakeholders from system tray, reusable interactive Help menu driven by Redmine's REST API, etc. (Maybe automate portions of documentation with the Wiki?)
I'm a freelance Ruby and Redmine web developer who runs a development business of one (me). So my Redmine is setup to be pretty lightweight and customer focused. My Redmine also serves double duty for hosting my Open Source projects.
I do allow new issues and updates to be emailed and it works great for email connected users (or those who are always on their iPhones).
I've been using the repository view with git repositories and it's working great. With every checkin I reference the issue with #nnn so the actual issue page will show all the commits to implement the feature.
I found the forums are underused. I think if there was some email integration, they would be more useful.
We have found useful the following practices:
1) Hide "Issue" and "Support" tracker, and file everything as a bug:
time-saver for developers, testers, management;
if some activities are to be billed as "extra" or "new feature" or anything else, quick meetings are arranged to assess them.
2) milestones & versions
I love this, you can easily track down the status of each release and at any time you can download an older package, i.e. to test a bug filed by client.
3) "save" function on "issues" tab: another big time-saver, I have different queries saved for many day-to-day reporting tasks and that's all I need.
4) versioning integration, i.e. using "#123" in comments creates a link to corresponding issue: simply clever!
We use Redmine extensively on our system. We have even set up a "Sales" project for our sales team to use as a CRM. We have a heap of custom fields in this project, and it replaces SugarCRM which we were using before.
Within our system, we have projects for Server and Client software. Server project is broken up into submodules, based on how I have structured the system and sub-repositories, since Redmine likes a seperate repo per project.
We use, as others note, #nnn codes in commit messages to reference tickets. What is cool is that it needn't be a ticket in the same project. Thus, a sales ticket can be blocked by a bug issue, or a support request.
We have just started using Documents for agenda/minutes of meetings. We use Versions to group into releases, on both client and server.
To try to use Redmine Time Tracker plugin to track time, but I always forget to click start or end. We get daily emails about issues that haven't been touched in a while (Redmine Whining, I think), and that have due dates in the past or near future (Advanced Reminder).
Support emails go directly into our Support project, and if the email importing was a bit more robust (sometimes it doesn't create new tickets properly if the Project: line is included in the email), we would have website inquiries automatically generate Sales tickets. As it is, we just have to monitor Support tickets, and move them to Sales if applicable.
Things I would like to be able to do:
Have relationships between our system and redmine, so that tickets can be associated with a user or company in our system. Also, so that we can generate a new company from a Sales ticket at the relevant point. This just requires me to do some work.
Have a relationship between our error tracking software (sentry) and redmine, so that server errors generate a redmine ticket. Again, solvable with current technology.
Have a desktop client to redmine. The server is within our LAN, but being able to have a more flexible way to access the data other than the web page would be great. It's not that there is anything I can't really do in the redmine web interface, but something like Things.app is so much nicer to work in.
Have our support documentation all within redmine, and then generated out onto a public-facing server. That way, our support staff can maintain the documentation, edit in a nice way, and deploy changes out to doc-server.
Redmine has been fantastic for us so far. We use it as a multi-tenant ticketing/agile prioritization queue, and have tied it to SVN as well. In particular:
Installing/maintaining via SVN has been a breeze (I've migrated us from 1.1 to 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4 via the use of svn switch https//.../branches/1.3-stable . commands followed by the rake migrate commands with only occasional gem installations needed in between).
Backups of the database and stored files is a one-line script execution
We love the Time Tracker and Spent Time plugins. I would kill for a Mac OS X time tracking fat client for some of our office users, but that's beside the point :)
We don't use the Forums much, but heavily use Activity and Roadmap. Tying issues to specific versions is a godsend.
We also have Client/Server distinctions, but use the target version to tie the tickets to specify which goes where (and have open ended NEXT CLIENT RELEASE/NEXT SERVER RELEASE) so as to distinguish between while being worked on.
We mix metaphors for statuses - we use our lists first grouped by these ("Immediate", "Rejected", "Blocked", "Working", "On Deck" "The List", "Waiting For Build", "Released To Test", "Verified", "Released to Production", "Closed", "Cancelled).
Then, within each group above, we have this sorted list of Priorities: ("Immediate", "Prioritize Me", "Design And Size Me", "P1"…"P5", "P-Watch List"). This plus the above allow for easy workflow all from the issues area.
For the basic issues list, we do sort by "Priority", "Parent Task", then "Updated Date" - need that middle one so that Redmine indents nicely should there be a child task in the same grouping.
We use checkin commits to tie commits to issues (i.e., svn ci -m "This fixes #1733 #2.5, holy smoke what a weird foo bug. It is now bacon and unicorns.") - and have it move that issue to "Waiting For Build" (That used to be "Resolved", but I got tired of explaining that "Resolved" did not mean someone can expect to see it released yet).
I think I will have to go investigate the Redmine-stuff-to-do plugin though. +1 Question.
My company works with software and hardware developers of international origin. Before I joined the company, email was used with MS Word documents to relay our issues and bugs with software or hardware to request a fix. This process was impossible to track and maintain any kind of process. I implemented RedMine as a means to track the software and hardware bugs and it's been working very well since. There is a major language barrier with my situation. Thankfully RedMine can display in Sipmlified Chinese language and feedback has shown that this is OK so far from my developers.
Status
- When I find a software or hardware issue, Status is "New"
- When my software/hardware developers have seen this issue and they are working on it, they change status to "In Progress." They can use the % done if they wish from 0 - 50. I have them set % Done to 50 when they feel they have resolved the issue.
- I determine if the issue is fixed, and I change Status to "Resolved" and % done to 100%. This allows me to filter out issues < or equal to 50% to find issues that are still open.
Priority
- Low, Normal, High, Urgent, Immediate all translates well into Chinese.
Due Date
- I use this to tell me when the fix was originally uploaded by my software developers. It may take me 4-6 days to test something and close the issue. I like my Gannt chart to reflect the responsiveness of my software team, not how long it took me to approve the fix.
Category
- This always reflects the version of software or hardware where I found the issue. I use this to see which version of software had the most amount of bugs, and to make sure newer versions of software do not suffer from regression.
I have everyone included on the RedMine watchers list for all bugs. The email comes across as (New), (Resolved), or (In Progress) so my supervisors, and the supervisors and head engineers of the teams involved can all see the email and quickly read what progress is currently being made. Most of the other people involved never login to RedMine, I'm typically the only one. The emails serve perfectly to give instant updates to everyone whose only concern is whether or not progress is being made.
As you mentioned sending Word documents back and forward with your QA - I know this feeling, been there, done that.
The main issue for me was: QA people don't like to add issues in any bug tracker, they note them down in an editor next to them during testing.
We are using Redmine now with a nice addon - Usersnap (Disclaimer: We built the tool to solve this problem for ourselves.
Usersnap is great for web developers - add it to your web project and you will get screenshots directly attached to Redmine tickets - including meta information about the used browser, operating system and so on.
Our QAs/customers can enter bugs now directly in the web application and the devs get easier to reproduce bug reports into Redmine.
We are using the Roadmap section as a clear way to display:
bugs
features (that would be references to your word document, or link to html requirement pages)
reconciliations (differences between production values and test values)
and so on...
That is the main point of consolidation for us. The rest is used in relation with that (for instance, the 'announce' section is used to define the main milestone/release dates used in the roadmap)
In addition to the other comments I recommend the use of the "Stuff To Do"-Plugin (written by Eric Davis I think :)
Using that plugin allows you to drag-and-drop sort the order of issues across multiple projects.
https://projects.littlestreamsoftware.com/projects/show/redmine-stuff-to-do
We use Versions as a way to define sprints, so each Version is a sprint with the Roadmap view giving a clear illustration of progress. Issues in sprints are marked as 'ready for review' when completed and then closed when QA has verified.
We use a Version as a backlog for any issues that fall out of scope or lose their priority etc.
We have been using Redmine for about a year now and it has evolved on its own in many ways. We use versions to group issues together for a release, and categories to group issues by discipline.
Each issue goes through a workflow of new > in progress > resolved. Then the tester will close the issue when happy.
We would love to update the way we use Redmine, there seems to be so many great plugins, but we find so many of them are broken or won't install.
We use the wiki comprehensively for developer documentation.
I use cruisecontrol.rb for CI and FogBugz for bug tracking, but the more general the answers, the better.
First is the technical problem: is there an API for FogBugz? Are there good tutorials, or better yet, pre-written code?
Second is the procedural problem: what, exactly, should the CI put in the bug tracker when the build breaks? Perhaps:
Title: "#{last committer} broke the build!"
Body: "#{ error traces }"
I suppose this presupposes the answer to this question: should I even put CI breaks into my bug tracking?
At my company we've recently adopted the (commercial) Atlassian stack - including JIRA for issue tracking and Bamboo for builds. Much like the Microsoft world (I'm guessing - we're a Java shop), if you get all your products from a single vendor you get the bonus of tight integration.
For an example of how they've done interoperability, view their interoperability page.
Enough shilling. Generally speaking, I can summarize their general approach as:
Create issues in your bug tracker (ex: issue key of PROJ-123).
When you commit code, add "PROJ-123" to your commit comment to indicate what bug this code change fixes.
When your CI server checks out the code, scan the commit comments of the diffs. Record any strings matching the regex of your issue keys.
When the build completes, generate a report of what issue keys were found.
Specifically to your second problem:
Your CI doesn't doesn't have to put anything into your bug tracker. Bamboo doesn't put anything into JIRA. Instead, the Atlassian folks have provided a plugin to JIRA that will make a remote api call into Bamboo, asking the question "Bamboo, to what builds am I (a JIRA issue) related?". This is probably best explained with a screenshot.
All the CI setups I've worked with send an email (to a list), but if you did want—especially if your team uses FogBugz much as a todo system—you could just open a case in FogBugz 6. It has an API that lets you open cases. For that matter, you could just configure it to send the email to your FogBugz' email submission address, but the API might let you do more, like assign the case to the last committer.
Brian's answer suggests to me, if your CI finds a failure in a commit that had a case number, you might even just reopen the existing case. Like codifying a case field for every little thing, though, there's a point where the CI automation could be "too smart," get it wrong, and just be annoying. Opening a new case could be plenty.
And thanks: this makes me wonder if I should try integrating our Chimps setup with our FogBugz!
CC comes with a utility that warns you when builds fail, it probably isn't worth logging the failing build in FogBugz - you don't need to track issues that are immediately resolved (as most broken builds will be)
To go the other way round (FogBugz showing checkins that fixed the issue) you need a web based repository browser - FogBugz is easy to configure so that it shows the right changes.