YouTrack Issue & Bug Tracker

YouTrack Google+ Page

valerie.andrianova — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:03:22 +0000

Here we are with a good news for everyone who is interested in YouTrack! Now we’ve got a YouTrack Google+ page. We consider it to be a good way to share hot news about the latest updates, promotions, demos, webinars and any kind of information we would like you to get really fast. You are welcome to add YouTrack Google+ page to your circles to get all the important news right form your stream. We’ll be happy to hear from you in return. Leave your comments, questions and any kind of feedback you would like to share with us!

Track with pleasure!
JetBrains YouTrack Team

Download YouTrack 3.1.2

valerie.andrianova — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:54:44 +0000

We are happy to let you know that YouTrack 3.1.2, the latest update for your fast-flying issue tracker, is available! This minor update contains a number of import bug fixes. Download YouTrack 3.1.2 along with YouTrack Workflow Editor 3.1.2. If you are using YouTrack InCloud, your site is already upgraded to the latest version. If you would like to get more details, please take a look at the Release Notes, and don’t hesitate to share your feedback with us:

Submit issues and feature requests in our bug tracker.
Speak out at our community forum.
Submit private feedback using our feedback form.

Also, we encourage you to follow us on social networks to stay tuned to the latest news:

YouTrack on Twitter
YouTrack on Google+
JetBrains on Facebook

Keep tracking with pleasure!
JetBrains YouTrack Team

YouTrack 3.1.1 Is Available!

valerie.andrianova — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:59:55 +0000

Please welcome YouTrack 3.1.1, a fresh update for your favorite bug and issue tracker. This minor update includes important bug fixes for the recently released YouTrack 3.1. You are welcome to download YouTrack 3.1.1 along with YouTrack Workflow Editor 3.1.1, take a look at the full list of YouTrack 3.1.1 Release Notes for more details, and don’t forget to let us know what you think! If you are using YouTrack InCloud — a hosted YouTrack version, the latest YouTrack 3.1.1 is already there! Keep in mind that YouTrack InCloud is free to use all winter, so don’t miss the chance to sign up now!

Keep tracking with pleasure!
JetBrains YouTrack Team

Please Welcome YouTrack 3.1

valerie.andrianova — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:44:30 +0000

We are happy to announce that YouTrack 3.1 is released! We did our best to make a nice Christmas present for you and cheer you up! It’s been a while since the last YouTrack update, and this time we prepared a huge amount of great new features you definitely need to try. Check out what we’ve got for you this time!

Intelligent Duplicates Management

Keep focus and all details in one place. Getting lost in hundreds of duplicates? Now when you close an issue as duplicate, all its votes and watchers are automatically transferred to the main issue. And if you decide to unlink the duplicate issue, all its votes and watchers are transferred back to the original issue.
Filtering duplicates with comments and attachments. Now you can filter all duplicates that contain comments or attachments right from the main issue. You can also see the number of issues with comments or attachments. Simply navigate to the Linked Issues tab, then click ‘with attachments’ or ‘with comments’ as appropriate to navigate straight to the issues you need (instead of browsing the whole list of duplicates).

Change Custom Field Type

Need more than one Assignee or Build value? In YouTrack 3.1 you can change the existing custom field type from single value to multi values. This applies to Enumeration, Version, Build, User and Group custom field types.

View Changes History in Related Comment

Changes history is now merged with the related comment. You can see all the changes made at the same time right below the comment. If you normally comment the changes you make, now it’s much easier to go through the comments along with the changes made. And that’s not all - attachments can now be added or previewed from comments as well.

‘Has’ Search Keyword

YouTrack’s search syntax now allows you to filter issues with a specific attribute, such as attachments, comments, links, or none of these. For example, enter: has: comments has: votes to find all issues that have comments and at least one vote.

Paint States & Attach Multiple Files at Once

In YouTrack 3.1 you can attach as many files as you want to an issue or comment in one step, as well as paint your issue statuses with different colors.

Improvements

Mailbox Integration

If you use mailbox integration, you’ve probably noticed that all messages with the same subject are collected in one thread and are added as comments to the issue created from the original email. Now these comments contain only the reply itself, without the original message text.
One more addition concerns the visibility of issues created from email. In YouTrack 3.1, a new issue is created from the reply if its author does not have access to the original issue.

Administration

A custom workflow that allows you to specify the default user/group visibility for all new issues on project level.
‘Send test email’ option in now available while configuring e-mail notifications.
Log in and restore your password using an email address.

TeamCity Integration

Multiple build configurations support in integration mapping.
Choose whether to receive notifications on changes pulled from TeamCity, such as adding Fixed in Build values or any command applied.
Configurable polling interval.

Customizable Workflow

Find a tag by name, star/unstar issue for a specific user, create a new tag for a user.
Use code completion for Group and Version.
Perform string operations, including length, indexOf, contains, trim, split, etc.
Iterate users of group.
Show pop-up messages.
Check that collection contains an element.

REST API

We extended YouTrack REST API by adding the ability to get issues history.

Please check the Release Notes for more details. Download YouTrack 3.1 now or Sign up for YouTrack InCloud with the latest YouTrack version already available! By the way, YouTrack InCloud is free to use all winter!

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
JetBrains YouTrack Team

JetBrains Apparel Store News

Eugenia Dubova — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:34:40 +0000

A year ago, we launched our Apparel Store.
Throughout this year, we have fulfilled hundreds of orders, significantly improved our service and delivery.
The best news is that free shipping within the US is now included in the price. An extra $9 will take your T-Shirt to any part of the World. To tell you the truth, the price of the T-Shirt is now calculated on a zero-profit model.
Adding more cool products and other improvements is on the agenda. Your feedback and ideas are appreciated!

If you haven’t chosen a Christmas present for a colleague or for yourself, why not consider a YouTrack T-Shirt?
Order by the end of the week and get it for Christmas!*

—-
*in the USA. European customers can choose express shipping to meet the deadline.

YouTrack InCloud Notice for Beta-Testers

valerie.andrianova — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:07:09 +0000

As you may have noticed, YouTrack InCloud is out! Other than saying thanks to our beta-testers we would like to tell you about the important steps you need to take before December 31, 2011 to continue using your YouTrack InCloud site in production:

1. You’ll receive an email with a link to confirm your intention to use your YouTrack site in production. Please follow the link.
Note: Please contact us if you haven’t received the email by December 15, not even in your spam folder.

2. Fill in the form and confirm it. At this point we’ll create a JetBrains Account for you, which works as single sign-on for JetBrains online services, and also will be used as your customer profile in future. If you already have a JetBrains Account, please log in first.

3. You’ll receive a confirmation email with the link to your YouTrack InCloud site. Click the link to go to your site, moved to production and keeping all your data safe. Your new plan should include: 2,000 users + 20,000 reporters, free to use all winter.

4. You’ll receive an email with your new YouTrack InCloud site details. Please keep this email.

5. On March 1, 2012 you’ll receive a notice asking you to select the plan that suits your needs best, or switch to a free plan. You’ll have a month to switch and make the payment without interrupting your service.

Please feel free to contact our technical support if you have any questions. We’ll be happy to help. Thank you for choosing YouTrack InCloud!

Keep tracking with pleasure!
JetBrains YouTrack Team

YouTrack Goes to Cloud

valerie.andrianova — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:39:41 +0000

We are happy to announce the release of YouTrack InCloud, a cloud-based version of YouTrack, offering up to three months of free use. We would like to say thanks to all beta-testers who joined us in the early phase and gave us extremely valuable feedback!

So, what’s so good about YouTrack InCloud?

You get an all set-up, ready-to-go YouTrack site in less than 5 minutes

No need to take care of hosting, maintenance and updates

Your data are safe with daily backups stored on separate server

SSL connection and custom domain

Reporter accounts for your external users at no additional cost

Free Plan for teams of up to 9 users

Flexible Pricing, starting from $10 for a 10-user team + 50 reporters

Introductory period offer

As an introductory period offer, you get the maximum available plan including 2,000 Users + 20,000 Reporters, free to use all winter. Get started now>>

Who are Users and who are Reporters?

We’re introducing a new concept of user accounts - Users and Reporters. User accounts have the full set of permissions, while Reporter accounts have a basic set of permissions including issue reporting, commenting, linking, searching and viewing issues. A set of Reporter accounts is included in every commercial plan free of charge, which allows you to create additional accounts for your external users.

Get YouTrack InCloud and enjoy it free all winter or take a quick feature tour. If you are not ready yet, check YouTrack InCloud Pricing.

Enjoy your issue tracking as we host it for you!
JetBrains YouTrack Team

Post-Mortem of JetBrains YouTrack Zombie-Mode Issue

valerie.andrianova — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:02:35 +0000

As you might have noticed, on Wednesday, November 16, we experienced the problem with our own JetBrains YouTrack installation. The problem caused significant slowdown of the tracker and its further unavailability for users.
What went wrong
In our tracker we have a number of custom workflows, attached to different projects. Due to erroneous configuration, one of the workflow rules got into infinite loop while generating notifications, and started to increase loading of the server, which led to system’s slowdown.
Fixing the problem
Being unable to stop executing the rule via UI, due to its unavailability, we had to restart the server, which caused system downtime.
Lessons learned and preventative actions
In order to prevent this problem in future, we decided to add the timeout for the workflow rules execution. This issue will be implemented ASAP.

We apologize for the inconvenience you might have experienced due to our system downtime. Though, it was a very good lesson to learn from, and we’ll do our best to prevent our customers from experiencing this kind of issues with their own YouTrack installations.

Kind Regards,
JetBrains YouTrack Team

Streamlining Issue Management with GitHub and YouTrack

hhariri — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:48:52 +0000

The Typical Developer Workflow

* Thanks to @gregyoung for enriching me with whatthecommit.com

In general, as developers we hate uninteresting tasks such as managing issues, so the less time and effort we spend in tracking bugs and features the better. The worse case scenario is the one outlined in the previous workflow, i.e. work on a bug, comment the fix in source control and then separately manage the issue in an issue tracker. Ideally, we’d like to only have to indicate what we’ve worked on and how it’s related to a check-in once! And fortunately with YouTrack, we can. However, YouTrack goes one step further. It actually allows us to control issues from our source control. Let’s see how this plays out when it comes to using GitHub.

In essence we have two options when it comes to integration GitHub:

Directly via GitHub Service Hooks.
Use TeamCity as the gateway, which in itself offers other advantages (opening it up to other VCS’s too).

We’ll cover each of these in detail.

YouTrack and GitHub Service Hooks

Earlier this year, GitHub provided official support for YouTrack hooks, allowing for tight integration between the two systems. This makes it extremely easy to set up YouTrack for issue management.

Assuming we have a project already set up on YouTrack and GitHub:

1. Click on the project in GitHub and select Admin

2. Select the Service Hooks from the left-hand side menu

3. At the very bottom of the list of Service Hooks, select YouTrack

4. Enter the following information in the form provided

A few things to note here:

Base Url is the url of your YouTrack server, which is independent of the actual project.
Committers is the group in YouTrack that has permission to commit to source code for the particular.
Username should be a user on YouTrack with Server Admin rights [In an upcoming release this will change to only require Project Admin rights].

5. Switching over to the YouTrack side, the only thing required is the to create the Committers group and add the correct users to it. This step isn’t required but it’s good practice to limit the users that can update an issue to those associated with the project.

6. A last important step (which is performed once only) is to make sure the REST interface is activated on YouTrack (via the Administration Settings)

Putting it to work – Hello YouTrack Commands

Now that we have the two systems linked up, how do we actually get this to work? If you’re not familiar with YouTrack, you might not know about an amazing feature it has called commands.

When most people look at YouTrack, all the see is just another web application with links to click on. However, the true power of YouTrack is in it’s support for commands, which is basically a way of sending it different pieces of text that it understands. This is normally done using the Invoke Command window (Alt+Ctrl+J…yes YouTrack is VERY keyboard friendly):

We start typing text and YouTrack offers us completion and tries to figure out what we’re trying to do. It’s smart enough that it doesn’t need us to spell things out, i.e. instead of having to type “state: fixed assignee: hhariri”, we can just type “fixed hhariri” and it figures out the rest:

It even remembers recent commands we’ve applied to offer the same combinations to us on the next input.

Now if we take this concept of commands and combine that with the usually useless commit messages we can actually come up with something useful! We can use the commit messages to send YouTrack commands (in fact, with YouTrackSharp I’ve started implementing PowerShell commandlets to allow console support for YouTrack too). As such, from our console our Git GUI we can do the following:

What we’ve done here is provide a command as commit message. We’ve identified the issue we’re going to apply the command to (issue Id prefixed with #) and followed it by the command Fixed.

Once we do this and push it to GitHub, the Service Hooks in GitHub will now supply this information to YouTrack, which in turn parses the command and applies it to the issue:

Notice a few things here:

The issue’s history has been updated with the date/time it was resolved along with a comment saying it was emitted via commit by hhariri.
The issue has been actually marked as Fixed.
The Username is clickable. It has correctly identified the username that checked in and mapped that to the YouTrack user. How does it do know that? Simple. It’s based on the email address. That’s why it’s important to have the correct email address associated with both account.

Multiple Issues

YouTrack also supports multiple issues being updated via the commit message. In order to do this via the commit message, each issue should be on it’s own line (i.e. when using the console, don’t provide the –m option with the commit and have Git prompt you with an editor to input comments).

Also it is important to note that the commit messages are not limited to just the “Fixed” command, but other commands can also be added such as tagging an issue, etc. (comments currently is not supported).

Integrating GitHub (or any VCS) with YouTrack via TeamCity

The second option for integration between YouTrack and GitHub is using TeamCity as the gateway. The advantage to this mechanism (apart from using TeamCity!) is that it now opens the door to more VCS options, including Subersion, Perforce, Git, Hg and all VCS’s that TeamCity supports.

The steps to integrate YouTrack and TeamCity are pretty straightforward:

1. Click on YouTrack Administration and select TeamCity Integration

2. Select to Enable TeamCity Integration and click on the Add TeamCity Server link

Enter the information as described in the dialog box and click Save.

3. Once the server is set up, we now need to define the mappings between TeamCity and YouTrack projects. For that, we click on the define mapping link:

We need to define pretty much all the values in the dialog box (which are self-descriptive).

In addition to the minimum required settings, we can also define restrictions on which groups have access to viewing issues via the Permissions tab, as well define a default command to be set on issues affected by failed builds:

4. In order to get the User Mapping, YouTrack like before uses the Email address. As such, we need to make sure that our VCS is configured to map to email. This is done on the TeamCity side under My Settings and Tools which is located under the Username menu [Note we have now switched to TeamCity]:

We edit the corresponding settings and set the Git roots to use email:

5. That’s all that is needed in order to get VCS commands working via TeamCity acting as gateway. This will now provide us information and output like the following in YouTrack when sending a fixed command via a commit message:

With this, a new Tab appears on YouTrack named TeamCity which contains information about the commit being made along with a link to the username.

We could in essence stop right here. The next step however is to go full force and get some of the added benefits of integrating TeamCity and YouTrack, this time from TeamCity’s side.

6. Under TeamCity Adminsitration click on Server Configuration and then on the Issue Tracker tab

7. We now need to create a new connection by clicking on Create New Connection, and entering the following information:

Once we test the connection we can click Create and we’re done. From this point on, we can click on Changes and have drill-down information on issues, link directly to them, etc.

Summary

As we can see, there are two ways to integrate YouTrack and TeamCity. The former requires a little bit less of a setup but is restricted to GitHub (currently). The latter gives us the full benefit of having a tight integration between TeamCity and YouTrack and opens up the door to using any VCS that TeamCity supports.

Most importantly however, the purpose of all this is to streamline the process, making issue management simple, non-intrusive and easy to work with.

[Note: If you’re an OSS project lead, note that TeamCity and YouTrack Integration are already setup on Codebetter.com. Ping me if you need help setting up your project details to take advantage of what’s been explained here].

Handling Email Feedback: YouTrack to the Rescue

Ekaterina — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:02:50 +0000

Hello everyone! Thanks to our users, we receive lots of feedback every day. You post questions in our forum, create issues in our bug tracker, and, of course, you send us emails.
If you get feedback emails on a regularly basis, like we do, and your support team or a member of your development team processes them, you’ve probably faced the tiny inconvenience of keeping track of the status of an email and the person responsible for it.

Faced with this challenge, we wanted to find the best way to track all of these things, so no precious question would be left unanswered.

In JetBrains, we practice the ‘eat-your-own-dogfood’ principle. So we decided to manage feedback using our own YouTrack - and we’re very happy with the results. We’d like to share our experience with you, so you can apply it to your projects as well.

Generally, there are two things you need to do in YouTrack in order to automate the process: a) set up integration with mailbox and b) create custom workflow.

Without digging into the details of the settings, the tracking of emailed feedback now looks as follows:

YouTrack periodically checks the mailbox youtrack-feedback@jetbrains.com for new emails.
Once one or more new emails are discovered, YouTrack fetches them and creates new issues in a dedicated project, one issue per unique email. New issues are created with the following parameters:
- Issue summary and issue description generated from email’s subject and email’s body, respectively.
- All the email attachments are attached to the new issue.
- Issue Reporter is set to email author.
- Issue is unassigned and its state is ‘Unanswered’.
Our team receives notifications when an issue is created: a notification is sent to the project lead, while other team members are notified via ‘Unanswered feedback’ shared saved search.
When a team member adds a reply to the user’s question as a comment to the issue, the original email sender receives an email notification containing that reply. So most of the time, we keep the conversation within an issue, via comments.

So far this process is implemented using Mailbox integration only. But to make our life even easier, we’ve designed a workflow to manage the life-cycle of created feedback issues. This workflow contains four rules covering the following processes:

Notifying about unanswered feedback. We use the scheduled rule, using which YouTrack daily checks the feedback project for ‘Unanswered’ issues and notifies the team if any such issues are left.
Setting the state of issue to ‘Answered’ or ‘Unanswered’ according to the latest comment: if a comment is from an external user, the issue becomes ‘Unanswered’; if the comment’s author is a team member, the issue becomes ‘Answered’.

Setting assignee on team’s comment. A team member who is the author of the latest comment containing the answer automatically becomes the issue’s assignee. This way we know who ‘owns’ the conversation at the moment.
Resolving issues automatically if the issue is marked as ‘Spam’. Of course quite a bit of this ‘feedback’ is actually spam, but we deal with it just like this: when an issue’s type is changed to ‘Spam’, its state automatically becomes ‘Answered’.

Please refer to How To guide for the detailed steps of setting up Mailbox integration and creating Workflow rules. You can also download the described workflow and attach it to your project as is. Keep in mind that you can always customize the process according to your specific needs.
Download YouTrack 3.0.4 along with YouTrack Workflow Editor 3.0.4 if you haven’t yet.

Manage your feedback with pleasure and make your users happy!

JetBrains YouTrack Team