Building Source Code

[eagad]

Are there any instructions for building the source code for iceScrum from GitHub? I’m interested in contributing to the project, but I can’t get it to build.

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your interest in contributing to iceScrum!

The current released version, iceScrum R6, is rather difficult to setup and will be deprecated by iceScrum R7 in the upcoming months. The whole front-end and large parts of the backend have changed in iceScrum R7 so I would not recommend investing in iceScrum R6.

We currently focus on iceScrum R7 development and we don’t have the resources to facilitate and support community developments yet.

Can you tell us about the additional features you would like to implement?

[eagad]

It is good to hear that work is still happening on R7. It seems like it has been a long time since I read that email announcing that version was coming. Is R7 available on GitHub in a branch or are you keeping it under wraps for now?

I get a lot of little requests from developers within our organization, and I wanted to learn the process for building from source so that I could explore and evaluate the difficulty of contributing those enhancements. Most of these are small, but would benefit all users of iceScrum.

The biggest one is probably the ability to record burn-up on tasks in addition to burn-down over time. Users want to improve their estimations and one way to do that is to compare how long they thought it would take to complete a task with how long it actually took to complete the task.

When do you think that you will be releasing an R7 version? Maybe a beta?

[Nicolas Noullet]

Thanks for your feedback.

You are right, we have been talking about iceScrum R7 for a long time. It took many more iterations than what we expected but we did not want to rush into when defining the ground for the future of the tool. Also, we stopped writing newsletters for a while and we rather focused on blog posts in addition to better content on the website. We are actually focusing all our efforts on iceScrum R7, here is a recent blog post about iceScrum R7: https://www.icescrum.com/blog/a-bright-future-for-icescrum/

For the moment our policy regarding source code is exactly the same as before, that means that all the iceScrum “community” source code is freely available on GitHub. Sources for iceScrum R7 is actually on the master branches of our repositories: https://github.com/icescrum/iceScrum.

Contributing to iceScrum R6 required a deep understanding of the custom architecture that we designed at a time where no good public alternative existed. We are building iceScrum R7 on top of modern and well defined technology and contributions in the form of extensions / plugins was in our mind from the beginning so contributions should be way easier.

A public beta version in expected to be available online within a week (at first we will not release standalone versions). However we will probably wait until it is production ready before providing tools (extension templates / documentation…) to facilitate contributions.

Recording the time spent to actually develop a task is a topic we discussed a lot and we will be glad to exchange with you about that when we will be less busy!

[eagad]

I pulled down the master branch of https://github.com/icescrum/iceScrum and I’m still having trouble building it. I haven’t worked with grails before so that may be the main problem for me. It seems that the version of grails might be important. Do you have any basic instructions for building the R7 code?

I would like to participate in the beta for R7 too. Please add me to the list. Thanks!

[Nicolas Noullet]

You are right, the version is important. We use Grails 2.x, the latest being Grails is 2.5.4. It should build fine and you can get a .war file by using the grails war command. You can then run this .war in a Tomcat server as explained here: https://www.icescrum.com/documentation/application-server/#application-server_1

Unfortunately setting up a full development environment is way more complicated than that. As I told you, we will work on that as soon as we have the time to do so, which means after the release of iceScrum 7. The preferred way to contribute to iceScrum will be via Grails plugins. We will provide a plugin template and explain how to hook into existing iceScrum features. The plumbing for that already works but it will probably change until we have ported all the iceScrum Pro features.

By having an account on our website, you should be able to use the beta! Just follow the link in the banner or open this link http://beta.icescrum.com

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