John, your article made my day yesterday! I could not hope for a better review of our products especially coming from an unknown and hence objective user. And it was nice to meet you (over email) on such a surprising occasion.

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For those who had a chance to read the article I wanted to add a few clarifications.

1. When John is talking about the release/iteration planning process in YOXEL SW

In the planning stage, tasks (or requests as they are called in Yoxel) are added to the plan. The requests are assigned to a particular component of the project. Each request is then classified as either an enhancement to existing code , or a completely new development. … Once this is done, you can later go in and add the details to each step.

He describes a quick way of creating a list of tasks with brand new requests. I would like to add that the release planner also is linked to your backlog (requests and bugs you have filed before) and you can easily include any of those into the list too. There are buttons [add existing request] and [add request by number]. You can include bugs into your plan this way too.

2. Regarding the estimates:

The estimate tab generates time estimates based on all the data entered for a particular release.

Essentially all your developers and testers enter their estimates for the tasks in your list/plan and the planner uses these to estimate the project end date and suggest more balanced resource allocation.

3. About the common approach:

YOXEL IT is very similar to YOXEL SW . In fact the ticketing system is practically identical to the request system used for Yoxel SW, and the IT project system is pretty much the same as the Yoxel SW release management.

This is very true. The heart of Yoxel is a scalable and parametrized workflow and request tracking engine. It takes little effort to create yet another tracking system (software, IT, sales, evaluations, KB, …). The base code (the RequestTracker class) is always the same and sure the UI looks somewhat similar for all the trackers.

4. About YOXEL KB

The knowledge base only applies to the software module.

Actually all menus in Yoxel portal are customizable so one can easily add the KB tab under IT section/module and add categories related to IT too. You may find _menu.inc files that control all the menus under individual sub-directories, although at the moment we have not yet documented them.

5. John had a good tip on securing Yoxel /includes directory.

Depending on your Apache configuration, you will probably have to secure up some of the directories within the Yoxel package. In particular, you will want to secure up the includes, not only with file system permissions , but also in the apache configuration.

I would actually recommend securing all .inc files, not just the /includes dir. A few of those (like _menu.inc and _help.inc) are spread out in other directories:

6. MySQL:

The database is called local_yoxe ldb2. You will need to create this with MySQL: create database local_ yoxeldb2;

Actually you do not have to worry about this. The first time you connect to Yoxel portal it creates the database automatically.

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I think this is all I wanted to add. Other John’s tips are quite useful, I will incorporate them into our README (installation instructions) file.

Enjoy!

The files tip above should read, where you replace asterisk with the asterisk sign, the forums encoding is messing up the example.

< Files asterisk.inc > Order allow, deny Deny from all Satisfy All
</files>