Features News

YouTrack Daring Roadmap

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:

    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:

  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:

  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:

  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:

  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:

  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:

  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:

  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!

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