Codebase - Software Project Management

We're introducing two new code review features into Codebase today; comments on individual lines in a commit and merge requests.

Merge Requests

Merge requests allows a feature branch to be reviewed in a formal way before being merged into a mainline branch. You'll find this helpful if you tend to work with feature branches and have someone responsible for checking over changes before merging deploying them to live or staging environments.

The merge request view enables you to see the all of the changes that would be made by merging the two branches. If the branches can be merged without any conflicts then you'll be offered a button to automatically merge pressing this will take care of the merging for you.

We've needed to move some items in the repository navigation to make way for merge requests, so the "Branches" and "Tags" tabs can now be found linked from our new, enhanced "Browsing" menu. Merge Requests can be found in the tabs at the top of the repository browser.

Inline Commenting

Codebase has allowed you to comment on commits for some time, but sometimes you need to comment on a specific line of code, maybe to highlight its genius, or deride it's madness. Now you can, just hit press the comment icon next to a line of code in a commit or diff to add a comment to that line.

For some time now we've been working to improve the way you can be notified of things happening in Codebase. e-mail notifications have been available for a variety of actions for some time, however last year we released Noti which allows web apps to send users desktop notifications. We wanted to introduce Noti support into Codebase, along with the ability to keep track of notifications within the Codebase interface itself.

Today we're rolling out our new notifications interface, with options to notify you by e-mail, Noti or within Codebase itself. Whenever you see the notifications button, just press it to decide how you want to be notified.

We've also added the ability to watch changes occurring across whole projects, or even entire accounts. Our new notification preferences let you do just that. Just click on the gear in the notification drop down. From the preferences page you can configure whether you want to be notified of all occurrences of an event, silence them completely, or accept the account default.

All of your existing notifications will be imported into the new system, including project-wide autowatch preferences. To change your notification preferences just press the gear icon in the notifications dropdown.

We've also redesigned our notification emails to make them easier to read, and contain more relevent information.

To enable desktop notifications just click "Enable Desktop Notifications". If you already have a Noti account, you can just login here to enable notifications from Codebase. Otherwise, just sign up and download the client.

This week we launched the new commit graphs in Codebase. You can now visually identify the branches in your Git or Mercurial repository, track commits and merges through time.

From your repository browser, just click on the "Graph" tab.

If you've got a lot of commits, the graph will paginate with 100 commits per page. We've worked really hard on this fantastic visualisation, and hope you find it as useful as we do.

Earlier this week we rolled out an updated ticket view. These changes have been made to make room for future features, and increase the prominence of information which can be linked to a ticket from other areas of Codebase.

In this blog post I'd like to take you through some of the features of the new interface.

The bar on the right hand sie of the page has been given over to the display of pieces of information that are related to the ticket.

The top section shows details of the milestone the ticket is part of, the deadline for that milestone and who is responsible for it overall.

The middle box deals with any linked tickets which must be closed before the ticket. The coloured dots represent the status of the linked ticket. If you're unsure what the colour means, hover over it and the name of the status will be presented.

Finally, the lower box represents the exception that this ticket is linked to, along with the last known occurrence and how many times that exception has been logged.

The delete/move/watching ticket functionality has now been moved from the right hand side of the page to the buttons at the top of the page.

The main ticket body has now been simplified. There is less metadata in the sub-properties box, such as Ticket reporter and estimated time, since much of it has been moved to the right column.

User avatars have been given a more prominent display on the left hand side, with the users name alongside to make for easier reading. A clearer distinction is now in place between the content in a ticket, and any ticket properties that have been modified in that update. Additionally, changed ticket properties now have property dependent icons, to make it easier to see at a glance what has changed.

We hope you enjoy these new changes, but we're always welcome to suggestions if you think something can be improved. Just drop an email to support@codebasehq.com.

Here at aTech Media, as you can imagine, we use Codebase for tracking all of our future software development and current issues. We were recently having a discussion into how we could better manage our personal workloads by making it easier to pick things up and place them back on the backlog.

We decided that the best way to go about this was to improve the current account-wide “My Tickets” view to allow the assigning and unassigning of tickets.

This page two tabs, one for tickets currently assigned to you, and another which contains all of the currently unassigned tickets for projects that you’re currently assigned to. Selecting the checkboxes on each ticket list allows you to either assign these tickets to you or release them so that someone else can pick up the ticket.

This new ticket view can be accessed from the main dashboard’s “Tickets” link.

One of the most requested features on our Uservoice Page was the ability to mark a ticket as dependent on another ticket being completed. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve recently rolled this functionality into Codebase for all of our users.

To add a ticket as blocking, navigate to the new “Related Tickets” tab in the ticket update area and press “Mark a ticket as blocking this ticket”. Simply select the tickets you wish to mark as blocking and press the “Link Tickets” button.

Once your ticket is added you’ll have a quick view of the tickets that still need to be closed before this one at the top of the page, and an overview of all the dependencies and dependants of this ticket.