Mingle Tip: Change A Password When Mingle Won’t Send Email

This trick probably won’t be used that often, but it might be nice to have if you get stuck. If you have a Mingle installation that isn’t configured to send out emails and you have forgotten your password for some reason, you can change your password if you’ve got access to the database.

mysql> update users set lost_password_key = 123, lost_password_reported_at = CURRENT_TIMESTAMP where login = your_username;

Once you do that, you can go to this URL (substitute values for your installation):

http://your-mingle-installation.com:8080/profile/change_password?ticket=123

That will let you reset your password.

March 25, 2008 | Filed Under Mingle | Leave a Comment 

Mingle Tip: Pipeline Your Team

Working on a larger team can really show off some of the flexibility and power of Mingle. Often, teams use Mingle as a virtual story wall. The grid view is a valuable tool to manage cards this way, but it can become overwhelming when actually working with the cards on a daily basis. Different parts of the team are not always concerned with all of the stages their cards are in. Creating segmented work areas for your team can help them get to exactly what they want with minimal searching. I call this Team Pipelining. Let’s take 3 examples and see how pipelining your team can help.

h3. Analysts

Analysts need a view of their own for upcoming story management. Without all of the distractions of current development, analysts get a focused view of what work they need to complete. Iteration or Project Managers can get a quick view of all of the stories that will be ready for development and can use their area to prioritize it. This view is simply a grid view on 3 card statuses for this project which is a card property.

Mingle Analyst Pipeline

h3. Developers

Developers want to find stories that need to be picked up or are being worked on quickly, so this view is more for them as well as anyone that’s interested in the development progress of the iteration at a low level.

Mingle Dev Pipeline

h3. Testers

Testers want to see when cards get past development and how they are being tested. Sorting their cards by another property called “Test Status” and applying some filters to only show cards that have been finished by the development team, testers can get a work area all their own that only shows that they need to immediately work on.

Mingle Testing Pipeline

h3. Coming Up

Sharp readers will notice that I didn’t use Iteration Planning as an example here. That’s coming in another Mingle Tip because it deserves it’s own special treatment.

Mingle 2.0 will make Pipelining even more powerful by adding story trees and all sorts of cool filtering abilities that will allow Mingle to fade into the background, so to speak, and let your teams focus on what they need to get done.

March 3, 2008 | Filed Under Mingle | Leave a Comment