Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
To-dos
are used to assign detailed work to individuals or teams. Due dates, time estimates, and so on are tracked.
Like features, to-dos have a self-join capability that allows you to subdivide them as more information becomes
known during the development process. This is handy when a single to-do requires effort from more than one team.
When a defect is found, it's reported as a bug.
Bugs
have their own lifecycle that includes a rich set of attributes
such as description, resolution, release, assignee, context, and date information. When you find a bug that turns out to
be a design flaw, Team Development allows you to link the bug to multiple features, milestones, and to-dos, because
the bug fix might require an extended time that spans a number of product releases.
Feedback
is one of the main sweet spots of Team Development. The feedback mechanism can be installed in
an application in a matter of minutes and gives the entire team an efficient and elegant communication channel
for comments, suggestions, issues, defect reports, and responses. Once installed in an application, the feedback
mechanism is promoted with the application from the development environment to the test environment and on
to the production environment. Feedback data and the related responses are copied back and forth between the
various environments via the APEX import/export facility. This keeps the developers, testers, and end users in close
touch with each other. Another key feature of the feedback mechanism is that it automatically records all the critical
“under the hood” data that end users know nothing about. The application context, environment variables, and, most
important, the session state are all captured. This data is invaluable when you're diagnosing an issue.
At first glance, the Team Development entities seem to contain a large number of attributes. So, do you have
to enter all these attributes in order to use Team Development? No. To get the most out of Team Development,
you and your team must plan how you're going to use Team Development with a view to effectively managing the
software-development process with minimum effort. You can pick a small subset of Team Development's attributes
that fit your software-development culture and key in only that subset of the data. Interactive reports can easily be
customized to display only the data that is important to you.
Team Development Interface
The Team Development interface is consistent with the overall APEX development interface. It makes extensive use of
dashboards to quickly give you an idea of how your teams are progressing. Drilling into the details to view and update
the data is fairly straightforward and intuitive. APEX developers will have no trouble navigating within the tool or
customizing interactive reports. Managers, testers, and business analysts will also be able to use Team Development
after a short training session.
APEX Home Page
The APEX home page (see Figure
15-2
) clearly indicates how important Team Development is to the APEX team.
The APEX team could have easily put Team Development under a minor link somewhere on the home page. Instead,
Team Development has been promoted into a marquee module that is on an equal footing with Application Builder,
SQL Workshop, and Administration.
