RT4 - The whole sordid story
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Building RT 4 took a lot more work than we'd expected. In the end, we learned some useful lessons and ended up with a great product.
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RT4 - The whole sordid story
- 1. RT 4 (Request Tracker 4.0) jesse@bestpractical.com http://bestpractical.com
- 2. Hi, I'm Jesse Vincent From Boston, MA in the US Perl Hacker Current Perl 5 “pumpking” Android Hacker (K-9 Mail) Kindle Hacker (Savory) Former Perl 6 project manager
- 4. Hi I'm Jesse Original Author of RT Partner at Best Practical RT project lead
- 5. (That just I don't get to code much anymore)
- 6. Best Practical We make RT We sell support We sell training We sell consulting We sell custom development
- 7. Our offices Boston, MA Moscow, Russia Hangzhou, China Pinglin, Taiwan
- 9. RT: Request Tracker General purpose ticketing system
- 10. GNU GPLv2
- 12. O(100) downloads every day
- 13. What is a ticketing system?
- 14. It keeps track of what needs to get done
- 16. It keeps track of what got done
- 18. ...along with lots of metadata
- 22. ...It's just a TODO list
- 23. On some very serious drugs
- 25. not
- 27. Important properties of ticketing systems ● Everything has a unique ID ● Everything has a timestamp ● History can't be edited or erased
- 28. What do you use a ticketing system for? Network operations Accounts Payable Bug tracking Accounts Receivable Call center Vacation rentals Helpdesk Youth counselling Customer service Workflow Work orders
- 29. What we use RT for
- 30. Bug Tracking
- 33. Resumes
- 35. Sales Leads
- 36. Accounts Payable
- 38. Who uses RT?
- 40. Who else uses RT? http://requesttracker.wikia.com/wiki/RTUsers
- 41. RT Scales
- 42. It scales down
- 43. (for testing or development)
- 44. Run RT on your laptop
- 45. SQLite
- 47. It scales up
- 48. Largest RT I know about
- 50. ...every day
- 52. Multiple front-end app servers
- 53. Big database server with hot standby
- 54. Designed to be hookable and pluggable
- 55. Plugins
- 56. ● ● rt-action-linearescalate ● rt-extension-log-memoryusage ● rt-action-notifygroup ● rt-extension-menubarsearches ● rt-ajaxyreplypage rt-extension-mergeusers ● rt-authen-bitcard ● ● rt-extension-mergeusershistory ● rt-authen-openid2 ● rt-extension-nagios ● rt-bugtracker rt-bugtracker-public ● rt-extension-notificationmatrix ● ● rt-condition-complex ● rt-extension-priorityasstring ● rt-crypt-smime ● rt-extension-quickcalls ● rt-extension-activityreports ● rt-extension-quickdelete ● rt-extension-activityreports-billing ● rt-extension-quickupdate ● rt-extension-addadminccsonqueuechange rt-extension-reportspam ● rt-extension-attributewalker ● ● rt-extension-rt_cpan_org rt-extension-captcha rt-extension-spawnlinkedticketinqueue ● ● ● rt-extension-cloneticket-withdata rt-extension-utils ● rt-extension-commandbyemail ● rt-extension-commandbymail ● rtfm ● ● rt-extension-commentoncreate ● rtfm-extension-articletemplate ● rt-extension-customfield-hideemptyvalues ● rtir ● rt-extension-datediscordian ● rtx-calendar ● rt-extension-extractcustomfieldvalues ● rtx-emailcompletion ● rt-extension-formtools rtx-ticketlist-transactions ● rt-extension-jsgantt ● ● rtx-workflowbuilder ● rt-extension-ldapimport
- 57. (and a bunch more created by RT users)
- 58. RT 4.0
- 59. Now available?
- 60. Not quite
- 61. Christmas 2010: 4.0.0RC1
- 62. March 24, 2011: 4.0.0 RC7
- 64. hcchien has been asking me to do a talk on RT4 since at least 2006.
- 65. I've been promising “next year” for 5 years.
- 66. We started RT4 in September 2007
- 67. I named it 3.999-DANGEROUS
- 68. In literature, they call that foreshadowing
- 69. I do public RT trainings a few times a year
- 70. I talk about RT's history
- 71. These are the slides I use
- 72. A Brief History of RT
- 73. RT 0.9 (1996) ● Designed for use at a single company ● 2 sysadmins ● 30 users
- 74. RT 1.0 (1999) ● Same as RT 0.9 + a bit more courage ● Used at hundeds of companies ● Dozens of CSRs ● Thouands of requests per day ● Intense guilt
- 75. RT 2.0 (2001) ● Total rewrite ● Just after Jesse escaped Microsoft ● DBIx::SearchBuilder ● Abstraction ● Whole new UI ● No more frames ● “Keywords”
- 76. RT 3.0 (2003) ● Overhauled web interface ● Extension mechanisms ● Internationalization ● Custom fields ● Cleaner internals ● Tests
- 77. RT 3.2 (2004) ● New search UI ● Spreadsheet / RSS output ● Outgoing mail preview and logging ● UI improvements ● No major structural changes ● More tests
- 78. RT 3.4 (2005) ● Reimplemented Custom Fields ● Custom fields on users, groups transactions ● Generalized Transaction system ● Faster, Faster, Faster ● Prettier ● Even more tests
- 79. RT 3.6 (2006) ● All-CSS layout and styling ● Customizable homepage ● Built in charts and reports ● Ticket "reminders" ● Comprehensive test coverage ● Cleaner code
- 80. RT 3.8 (2008) ● More user preferences ● Timezones ● Theme ● Ticket history order ● New configuration system ● Even more tests
- 81. RT 3.8 (continued) ● “Favorite” tickets ● Ticket relationship graphs ● Branded queues ● iCal feeds ● PGP support
- 82. RT 4.0 (2008?)
- 83. Never trust a vendor who makes promises about unreleased products
- 84. That's really what it said!
- 85. It was sort of a joke
- 86. ...little did I know
- 87. All Taiwanese know that 4 is very unlucky
- 88. You're supposed to just skip 4
- 89. Nobody warned me
- 91. In my culture, 6 is the unlucky number.
- 93. Along came 2006
- 94. We started thinking about building RT 4.0
- 95. RT is big
- 97. RT is big
- 99. RT is complex
- 101. RT is complex
- 103. RT is old
- 105. RT is old
- 107. What would we change?
- 108. Modernize the API
- 110. Use a framework!
- 111. Jifty
- 112. AJAX
- 113. Modern API
- 114. Lots of testing affordances
- 115. Plack
- 117. UI Helpers
- 118. So, we started refactoring
- 119. Not a from-scratch rewrite
- 120. ..but pretty close
- 121. No deadline
- 122. "It'll be ready when it's ready"
- 123. No fixed deliverable
- 124. "We want it to be good"
- 125. So, we went to work.
- 126. What went wrong?
- 127. We moved files around
- 128. Git made that sort of ok
- 129. We decided to modernize our coding style
- 130. We started renaming classes and methods
- 131. RT's API was old and InterCapped
- 132. The modern perl world is prettier_looking
- 133. We built refactoring tools
- 134. We ported the full test suite
- 135. RT 3.6/3.7 were still in active development
- 136. We were fixing lots of bugs in 3.6
- 137. It was a constant battle to merge forward
- 138. 3 years in, RT 3.999 was largely "done"
- 139. 60% of the code of RT 3.8
- 140. Almost the same feature set as RT 3.8.0
- 141. Almost the same test suite as 3.8.0
- 142. Much cleaner
- 143. Ran on Jifty
- 144. Ran on Plack
- 145. New "Ticket Lifecycles" system
- 146. Much of the UI ported to Template::Declare
- 147. It was a lot better
- 148. It killed off lots of bad old API decisions
- 149. ...but mostly better for RT's developers
- 150. 2627 commits
- 151. 3 years of development
- 152. 1484 files changed, 174558 insertions(+), 319761 deletions(-)
- 153. 3.999 was different than 3.8 in some important ways
- 154. The API was recognizably the same
- 155. 3.999 was better than 3.8 in some important ways
- 156. The API was 100% incompatible
- 157. There were lots and lots of reasons to make the change
- 158. There are lots and lots of RT extensions out there.
- 159. We've done at least 75
- 160. There are more on CPAN
- 161. Just about every RT instance has some local customizations
- 162. RT has been downloaded about 100 times every day
- 163. For the past 5+ years
- 164. How many of you have ever customized or extended some software?
- 165. Guess what happens when you change an API?
- 166. Ever had an API change break your customization?
- 167. RT has many users
- 168. They rely on many, many RT extensions
- 169. ● ● rt-action-linearescalate ● rt-extension-log-memoryusage ● rt-action-notifygroup ● rt-extension-menubarsearches ● rt-ajaxyreplypage rt-extension-mergeusers ● rt-authen-bitcard ● ● rt-extension-mergeusershistory ● rt-authen-openid2 ● rt-extension-nagios ● rt-bugtracker rt-bugtracker-public ● rt-extension-notificationmatrix ● ● rt-condition-complex ● rt-extension-priorityasstring ● rt-crypt-smime ● rt-extension-quickcalls ● rt-extension-activityreports ● rt-extension-quickdelete ● rt-extension-activityreports-billing ● rt-extension-quickupdate ● rt-extension-addadminccsonqueuechange rt-extension-reportspam ● rt-extension-attributewalker ● ● rt-extension-rt_cpan_org rt-extension-captcha rt-extension-spawnlinkedticketinqueue ● ● ● rt-extension-cloneticket-withdata rt-extension-utils ● rt-extension-commandbyemail ● rt-extension-commandbymail ● rtfm ● ● rt-extension-commentoncreate ● rtfm-extension-articletemplate ● rt-extension-customfield-hideemptyvalues ● rtir ● rt-extension-datediscordian ● rtx-calendar ● rt-extension-extractcustomfieldvalues ● rtx-emailcompletion ● rt-extension-formtools rtx-ticketlist-transactions ● rt-extension-jsgantt ● ● rtx-workflowbuilder ● rt-extension-ldapimport
- 170. We broke all of them
- 171. (all the extensions)
- 172. (all the users)
- 173. RT 3.999 had 40% less code than RT 3.8
- 174. RT 3.999 looked just like RT 3.8
- 175. RT 3.999 had almost the same features as 3.8
- 176. ...with one really big change
- 177. RT 3.x has a system called “Scrips”
- 178. Scrips let you build custom business logic
- 179. They're sort of like “if...then...” statements
- 180. They can fire after any update
- 181. RT's approvals system uses Scrips
- 182. RT's email-sending rules use Scrips
- 185. Scrips are unchanged since RT 2.0
- 186. We decided to replace Scrips in RT 3.999
- 187. I wanted a simple macro language
- 188. clkao built the backend
- 189. “I'm not building a stupid macro language. If we're doing this, it should support eval and apply”
- 190. We created lorzy
- 191. It was a lispy language
- 192. ...with named, typed parameters
- 193. We ripped out Scrips and dropped in lorzy
- 194. Greenspun's Tenth Rule Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug- ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
- 195. ...at least we did it on purpose?
- 196. So, have I sold RT 3.999 to you?
- 197. I don't like hurting users.
- 198. I don't like hurting customers.
- 199. Last summer, we threw away 3 years of work.
- 200. [sad panda]
- 201. What'd we learn?
- 202. Second system syndrome hurts a lot
- 204. .oO{ My problem is that I actually have users I don't want to alienate }
- 205. A working test suite is not a magic bullet
- 206. Incremental updates vs gut renovation
- 207. Got a working system?
- 208. Make the smallest change that could possibly work
- 209. Build for your users
- 210. When we do client work, they say that they want high-quality software last week for almost free.
- 211. "Good, fast and cheap, pick any two"
- 212. Turns out that you must pick two.
- 213. Last summer, we started RT4 over again
- 214. What'd we do different this time?
- 215. We were working for a customer
- 216. The customer wanted RT 3.8...
- 217. ...with a lot of extensions.
- 218. They wanted to pay us to integrate those extensions.
- 219. We had a deadline
- 220. We had a fixed set of deliverables
- 221. We had a mostly fixed set of deliverables
- 222. We got to work
- 223. The client wanted frequent beta releases
- 224. The new RT 3.9 needed to be deployable at any time
- 225. Lots of topic branches
- 226. We started pulling in work we'd already done as core features
- 227. RTFM became Articles
- 228. Stock answers
- 229. Really useful
- 230. Lots of folks don't install it
- 231. So, now you don't get a choice
- 232. Lifecycles
- 233. Originally built for 3.999 & backported to 3.8
- 234. Mobile Interface
- 236. Date custom fields
- 237. IP address custom fields
- 238. Full-text search for MySQL, Postgres and Oracle
- 239. Gmail-style folding of ticket history
- 241. Some new features, we built from scratch
- 242. New auditing and debugging tools
- 243. A brand new visual theme
- 244. A brand new theme editor
- 246. A new permissions editor UI
- 248. Dropdown and radio-button custom fields
- 249. Autocompleters for users and email addresses
- 250. Ported to Plack
- 251. Some stuff, you'd never notice
- 252. Overhauled how we do boilerplate code
- 253. (Fewer files change. They change less)
- 254. Cut down our use of autoconf
- 255. Made the test suite much faster
- 256. Eliminated "noise" from the test suite
- 257. Successfully delivered to customer
- 258. Since then, we've been stabilizing, fixing bugs and improving docs
- 259. RC 1 came out just after christmas
- 260. RC 7 came out last week
- 261. We're very, very close.
- 263. Release Candidate means we think it's ready for production
- 264. If it breaks, email rt-bugs@bestpractical.com