YouTrack Issue Tracker

Hello, everyone! Today we have two major news for you.
First, we have published the new EAP build (build #664) for YouTrack Daring. You probably already know that if you follow us on twitter. What you don’t know yet is that with this EAP build we’ve completed general development of custom fields. All planned functionality has been implemented, and now we’re polishing details. Check back soon for a detailed post on custom fields.

As for the EAP, check the Release notes, download the build, give a try to all new features and feel free to post your feedback and questions on our forum and issue tracker.

Moving on to the second item we’ve got for you today: With today’s EAP we announce a feature freeze for YouTrack Daring. We’re now focused solely on enhancing, improving, testing and fixing. The feature freeze means we’re on the homestretch to release the new version, so stay tuned for updates!

Track with pleasure!
JetBrains YouTrack team

The new Daring EAP build (number 600) has been published today. The latest build comprises a number of recently fixed issues and brings you several new features and enhancements. Just a couple of improvements to mention:

• You can now search for issues which relate to, depend on, or duplicate other issues by using the corresponding keywords (relates to:, depends on:, and duplicates:) and <issue ID> as a value.
• A new keyboard shortcut - to help you quickly copy current issue’s details to the clipboard. By successively pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C , you can now select current issue’s ID, expand selection to issue’s summary, and, finally, clear selection. Simply use the old good Ctrl+C for the copy operation on the selected value(s).

See the list of new features or check the complete Release notes for more details.

Download new EAP build and evaluate the improvements.

Track with pleasure!
- JetBrains YouTrack team

Remember YouTrack Daring Roadmap that we announced just before New Year?

We’re starting to deliver on the promise by opening a new Early Access Program to let you download and evaluate early YouTrack Daring builds as we make them available.

As usual with EAP builds, they may cause quality concerns at times but we’re valiantly pre-testing Daring builds at our own YouTrack instance, and only the most stable of them are allowed to go EAP.

Important note! Do not use EAP builds in your primary production environment because YouTrack 1.0 database is not forward compatible with YouTrack Daring database. That means, if you’re not satisfied with the quality of Daring builds, you will not be able to revert to YouTrack 1.0 other than by rolling back to a pre-upgrade backup of your database and losing your progress along the way.

Once again, we kindly ask you to provide feedback on your experience with the new YouTrack version. You can submit feedback in several forms - specifically, feel free to:

• Report bugs and feature requests to our own YouTrack installation.
• Rate individual EAP builds right on YouTrack EAP Builds page.
• Speak out at YouTrack community forums.

Here’s a quick list to remind you of some of the things that the new YouTrack Daring brings to the table:

• Custom attributes to extend the predefined set of issue states: you can now configure YouTrack to save due dates, issue severity, browser and operating system version, or any other details that you may need to know about your issues. You create custom attributes using arbitrary enumerations or common types such as date and integer.
  
  Note that the initial implementation of custom attributes in EAP builds only supports creating them in Full Screen View and viewing them. Neither search nor commands support custom attributes just yet.
• Issue-level security. In YouTrack 1.0, you were only able to set access permissions for a specific project. YouTrack Daring introduces a way to restrict visibility of any individual issue to a certain user group:
  

• Group names in search requests. YouTrack 1.0 allowed involving user names in search requests - i.e., to find issues by assignee or reporter. YouTrack Daring develops on that by allowing group names in search queries - that, for example, allows you to easily filter issues reported from outside of your company, or vice versa:
  
• Search by comments. This is simple: by typing “commented by: me”, you get a list of issues that you have ever commented. By the way, combining this with group search renders some interesting statistics.
• Mapping one YouTrack project to multiple TeamCity projects. This enhancement targets scenarios where different versions of a product are built using different TeamCity projects yet tracked with a single issue tracker project.
• Integration with multiple TeamCity servers for large-scale and distributed environments.
• JIRA integration enhancements including import from JIRA 4 and converting JIRA components to YouTrack tags. To integrate YouTrack Daring with JIRA 4, you’ll need to download JIRA 4 integration plug-in and deploy it into WEB-INF\lib directory of your JIRA installation.
• Previews for attachments with zoom-in on mouse over:
  

Here’s the full list of issues addressed in the initial EAP build.

Download and enjoy the upgraded YouTrack!

If you have experienced problems trying to integrate YouTrack with LDAP, go get the latest YouTrack bugfix update, YouTrack 1.0.3.

For details on what was fixed and how you should configure LDAP, see description and comments at JT-2779.

You might ask, what are the other improvements that this new bugfix incorporates? There are none, so feel free to treat this as YouTrack 1.0 LDAP Special Edition.

Happy user access!

It’s been almost 2 months since YouTrack 1.0 release — a sufficient term to make up our minds regarding how we need to extend YouTrack capabilities further. Having combined external feedback with our own ideas, we feel we’re ready to reveal YouTrack roadmap for the upcoming version code-named Daring. As any roadmap, this one may change in terms of both functionality and deadlines. However, this is how we currently want the product to evolve.

YouTrack Daring is scheduled for release in Q1 2010. It will hopefully introduce the following improvements:

1. Customizable workflow. Working with issues involves multiple steps and options, and the person who’s in charge of an issue tracker installation should have tools to establish a certain workflow for users to follow. For example, you may want to restrict the set of issue attributes available to issue reporter by default, or you may need to reset “fixed in build” attribute value when an issue is reopened. Leading issue trackers provide ways to customize workflow, and YouTrack certainly needs this feature. Of course, we’re reviewing the competition’s experience in the field in order to come up with a better, faster solution.
   Related issues:
   • Support custom workflow and custom issue fields schemas
   • Customizable defaults for new issues
   • Clear fixed in build on reopen issue
   • Somehow force developer to set fix version on issue resolve
   • States settings per project

   Update. Customizable workflow has been rescheduled for the version that will follow Daring, YouTrack Energy.

2. Custom attributes. YouTrack currently provides a predefined set of attributes (Priority, Type, Assignee, Subsystem, Fix version etc.) that covers common software developers’ needs. However, sometimes, you need your own typed attributes for scheduling, references, hardware specifications or whatever else you require to efficiently track your issues. YouTrack Daring gives you the freedom to define which attributes to use to describe your issues, and which type each of them should have.
   Related issues:
   • “Due Date” feature for new tasks
   • Please add attribute “Operating System”.
   • Support custom fields.
   • Issue Time tracking capabilities including summary reports.
3. Upgraded search. Customer feedback and actively tracking our own products helped us reveal a number of limitations in YouTrack search query language. Fortunately, none of them are design-bounded, and we’re intending to safely resolve them in YouTrack Daring. Specifically, we’re enabling search by ranges so that when you want to display all issues fixed for, say, five versions, you don’t have to explicitly enumerate all of them. Other search improvements will include search by user groups (”find all issues created by external users last week”), subsystem search over multiple projects (important when several projects have subsystems with the same name - IntelliJ IDEA contributors should feel relieved), enhanced suggestions etc.
   Related issues:
   • Search by custom date range
   • Add ability to search issues not having tag A nor B
   • Organize states in filters into two groups: resolved and unresolved
   • Text-based search finds something unrelated
   • If few projects have the same Subsystem, query should contain results from both
   • Search query explanation
   • Limit text search by issue fields/comments
   • Subsystem Search over multiple projects should be possible
   • In case of search terms collision (#aaa can refer to several entities), display this to the user and allow to refine the search query
   • Completion list should list project-specific items first
   • Support search by ‘link type’ or get results by ‘link type’
   • Allow using group names in search requests
   • Search for issues commented by some user
   • Use saved search as context, just like now project is
   • Search before, after, between specified dates
   • Show “did you mean” suggestion if no records found
   • Search issues after build, before build, between builds
4. Improved commands. In addition to supporting custom attributes, YouTrack Daring is set to introduce a command to notify other users of an issue or a set of selected issues, and “undo” command to revert latest changes (pretty useful after inadvertently setting all existing issues to “can’t reproduce”). Besides, we’ll make sure that when you try to apply commands that you don’t have permissions to apply, the Command window warns you about that instead of just silently pretending that it doesn’t understand you, as it currently does.
   Related issues:
   • New command for issue: “notify #user”
   • On mark issues as duplicate automatically suggest issue with the smallest number as a main
   • Undo command
   • Support “untag” command on an issue
   • Commands should recognize everything (but do not suggest) and shows “access denied” message
5. More flexible TeamCity integration. Seems like customers use TeamCity in more ways than we’d thought possible. That means, YouTrack Daring should provide more paths of TeamCity integration - specifically, allow mapping multiple TeamCity build configurations to a single YouTrack project, and integrating multiple TeamCity installations with a single YouTrack installation.
   Related issues:
   • Allow multiple TeamCity integrations with a single YouTrack Project
   • Integrate YouTrack with more than one TeamCity installation
   • Integration with teamcity mapping should be visible as tab in project edit to let project admin to change it
6. Recent Activity view. It’s become commonplace to provide a way to see who’s done what lately in an application, so this is a bit of a mainstream feature: for all issues that you watch, you’ll be able to view who commented, voted, or updated them in another way.
   Related issue: Provide Recent Activity Tab
7. Permissions per issue and per issue type. YouTrack currently provides per-project and per-installation security but many public tracker administrators would like to be able to set custom access permissions for specific issues that contain private data. There’s also demand for per-issue-type security which could be more relevant with custom attributes.
   Related issues:
   • Set permissions per issue
   • Permissions per issue type
8. Jira 4.0 integration. YouTrack currently integrates with JIRA 3.x but since JIRA 4 is on the market for a while now, we’re up for an update.
   Related issue: Support JIRA 4.0
9. Improved REST API. Lacking any documentation, few of you know that YouTrack provides REST API with methods for creating, searching, and modifying issues. In YouTrack Daring, we’re going to take the curtain off this wonderful functionality, and extend it - with sufficient permissions, you’ll be able to manipulate users, groups, roles, and execute other administrative actions programmatically through the API.
   Related issues:
   • Document REST API
   • Plugins support
10. Easier installation. Installing YouTrack is in many cases as tough a hurdle as double-clicking a JAR file. However, we’re not completely satisfied with the current state of affairs in this area. First, we currently ask users to request an evaluation license right after downloading and installing YouTrack. This is not without sense but considering the additional difficulty that this step brings to evaluators, we’re going to integrate a common evaluation license directly into YouTrack installation and give evaluators an option to prolong it. Second, we’re currently asking YouTrack root administrator to log in on first YouTrack start. That’s going to trash can as well. Finally, we’re going to provide a third distribution option in the form of a Windows exe file for a true one-click installation experience.
    Related issues:
    • Distribute YouTrack as Windows exe file
    • Integrate evaluation license into installation package
    • Show message about license is about to expire
11. Check for updates. You’ll no longer need to keep an eye on your RSS feed to monitor YouTrack updates — the product will remind you itself whenever there’s a new release available.
    Related issue: Implement check for updates

You can glance through the full list of features scheduled for Daring. Of course, you’re encouraged to vote for features you like, and submit new feature requests.

Some of the features highlighted in this Roadmap should be available for you to evaluate in our upcoming Early Access Program that we’re committed to launch soon (hopefully before the New Year), so stay tuned for further news!

Download the latest minor YouTrack release, version 1.0.2.

See release notes for details - not too many of them though.

Fixed issues are mostly related to OpenID authentication and notifications.

We have revamped YouTrack login form to make it prettier and handier.

You can now log into YouTrack with an OpenID from one of five providers:

Ever attempted logging in from your smartphone? This is much easier now. Actually, it’s easier from anywhere: a single button click, and your Gmail (or Yahoo or whatever) credentials let you get in!

The new login form is available in YouTrack EAP starting from build 67.

Enjoy!

Now you can do it in search field:

… and in commands popup:

Also, your recent searches and recent commands are suggested as well now:

Fix bugs with pleasure