Tag: GitHub

Tracking progress

Joss Winn / / Development, Project Management

Did you know that you can watch our user requirements gathering and see how Orbital development is progressing by following our Github and Pivotal Tracker activity? Here are the key links:

Orbital Manager (the front end) (RSS)

Orbital Core (the back end) (RSS)

Pivotal Tracker (RSS)

Updates are also merged in a single stream of activity on Splendid Bacon.

Internally, we watch all of this activity through Campfire, thanks to Hubot and a bit of plumbing. Commits to Github, new stories and other activity on Pivotal Tracker, fire off API notifications which Hubot (‘Zakia’), delivers to Campfire. Here’s what this afternoon’s activity looked like.

Campfire
Watching Orbital progress on Campfire, using Hubot (Zakia)

Using a mixture of friendly APIs, asynchronous messaging and a chat bot provides us with a handy method of keeping track of what’s going on when we can’t all be in the same room.

Jenkins, build my software!

Nick Jackson / / Development

Orbital is going to be a big bit of software, with lots of things doing lots of other things. A big part of putting together such a large bit of software – alongside our Pivotal Tracker instance – is the regular process of ‘building’ the software from source code into something that can actually be used, testing it and getting it onto our development servers so that we can actually see what it’s doing. As part of Orbital we’re taking a step into what is a relatively unexplored frontier for the development team here at Lincoln – Continuous Integration.

Continuous Integration means that as we develop our software it’s constantly being built, tested and deployed to make sure that it’s behaving as expected. We’re using the popular Jenkins server to manage everything that’s going on as part of this process, as well as provide reports on what’s happened. We’re slowly adding more things to the list of what’s actually happening when the magic starts, but here’s what we’re going to be doing by the end of the project every single time that somebody makes a change to our codebase:

  • Ensure that the source code is available from GitHub.
  • Invoke Phing to do all kinds of additional goodness as part of an automated build, including:
    • Run unit tests on our code using PHPUnit.
    • Verify that the code adheres to certain style standards (We use the CodeIgniter Style Guide) using PHP Code Sniffer. Specifically we’re using Thomas Ernest’s implementation of the guide.
    • Run a whole battery of analysis that looks for messy code structure and duplicate code.
    • Automatically build the technical documentation using DocBlox. This isn’t the end-user documentation, but it does tell us exactly what all our code is supposed to be doing so that we have a reference.
    • Perform token replacement on the resultant codebase. This means that we can keep the code repository clear of all environment and institution specific configuration, since these are replaced as we perform a build.
  • Deploy the built codebase to our development and testing platform so that we can actually use it.
  • Tell us the results of all of the above in a variety of pretty graphs and reports.

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