Monday, March 29, 2010

APEX 4.0 - Looking at Feedback through Team Development

In the previous blog post I posted how you can add a Feedback link to your own application. I didn't specify how you can retrieve the Feedback, but got a question about it from Stew. I thought it might be useful for others, so decided to do another post about it.

In APEX 4.0, there's a completely new section called Team Development.
Team Development allows you to specify Milestones, Features, To Does ... but also to look into the Feedback.


I see the Team Development as something that helps you to do Agile Development. It's just a first try of the APEX Development team, so not perfect yet, but it's a lot better than an Excel file or I don't know what else people tend to use for handling their projects. But Team Development is definetely something you might want to give a try.

If you click on the Feedback icon you see the Feedback the people entered and you can Follow this up and make it a Bug, a Feature etc. As the Feedback option capture a lot of APEX specific things (e.g. in which app and page you were), it makes it all a bit easier to understand what the person is logging and to reproduce at your (the developers) end.


Obviously everything is stored in the APEX Repository so you can do whatever you want with it. Another good example if you want to see what you can do with it, is the APEX 4.0 Early Adopter feedback application itself. That app also sends a mail whenever feedback got updated.

at

7 comments:

  1. Unknown3/29/2010 11:41 PM

    Dimitri,
    One additional component we are working on is this import / export of Feedback from one environment to another.

    The feedback within EA2 is on an Amazon instance. The data is exported from there and imported into our Development instance where developers can review, any public response, etc. The feedback is then exported / imported back into EA2 for people to review.

    This will also be important for developers to be able to work with feedback from their applications deployed into a "Production" environment.

    Regards,
    David

    ReplyDelete
  2. Familien Dybvik-Nielsen3/30/2010 12:57 PM

    Thanks for keeping us updated concerning the 4.0 features. Its great to have these summaries (which is all I have time for during busy times).

    I wonder if the feedback is "linked" to the application or whether it has its own "life" in the metadata database.

    We often remove applications from production, and then deploy the application again (sometimes giving it a new app id).

    Hopefully the feedback will not be removed when removing/replacing applications ?

    brgds
    Martin

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dimitri Gielis3/30/2010 1:10 PM

    Martin, I'm not sure, but to my knowledge the feedback will stay even if you drop the application the feedback is based on.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unknown3/02/2011 10:44 AM

    Dimitri,

    We are planning to move development from Windows to Linux.
    Do you know any nice way to export whole TD objects (Features, Milestones, To Dos and etc.) from one environment to another?
    The only way I could think of is exporting and importing apex_040000 schema but this is quite brutal.

    Regards,
    David

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dimitri Gielis3/02/2011 10:57 AM

    Hi David,

    You can export the entire workspace. That should include team development too.

    Hope that works,
    Dimitri

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous6/24/2011 11:07 AM

    Hello Dimitri,

    What about different installations. We have a development environment and a production environment. The production environment however is a runtime-only installation, so the pages are not accessible to developers. Is there a way to retrieve the feedback information there as well?

    Regards
    Cor

    ReplyDelete
  7. Dimitri Gielis6/24/2011 12:34 PM

    You would need to export the feedback from production and feel that into development.

    ReplyDelete