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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I stumbled upon a question in the “ThoughtWorks Studios forums”:http://studios.thoughtworks.com/discussion/forums/1/topics/60 that never really got answered about having a full screen mode in Mingle. Using the steps I showed you from my last article, I’ll show you how to get rid of some interface elements that you may not need once you’ve got Mingle set the way you like using “Stylish”:http://userscripts.org/stylish again.

The code below will give you what dpattins wanted with comments explaining what each of those CSS selectors do. Note that you could further scope your stylish script to the card list in case you want the navigation back on other parts of Mingle.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("my.mingle.installation.com") {
/* #hd = header navigation
   #sidebar = filtering sidebar
   .basic-panel-one = card adding section
   #lanes-header = group/color selection  */

#hd, #sidebar, .basic-panel-one, #lanes-header {display:none !important}
}

This will probably only be interesting to a few people, but I’m putting it out there anyway. I’ve gotten tired of the orange header and yellow background in input fields in Mingle and decided to make a quick user stylesheet for use with “Stylish”:http://userstyles.org/stylish/.

Here’s the code you’ll need to make the header look like what you want and get rid of the yellow behind the input boxes when you are working on them. You can either paste this directly into Stylish as a new style or you can use the CSS rules in your own way. Just change the “my.mingle.installation.com” to the URL where you installed Mingle.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain(”my.mingle.installation.com”) {
/* Header Styles */
#hd, #hd-bottom, #hd-nav li.menu-item, #hd-nav li.menu-item a.first-link {background: #000 !important;}
#hd-nav li.current-menu-item, #hd-nav li.current-menu-item a.first-link {background: #FFF !important;}

/* Input Boxes */
input:focus, textarea:focus {background-color:#FFF !important;}
}

I may create a Firefox extension that will integrate more features like this for people if there is interest.

Have you ever been editing a card in Mingle and you lose your data because the session timed out? Well, if you are comfortable editing a config file in <mingle directory>/config/web.xml you can make the session timeout much longer. Here is what it looks like by default:


60


You can change it to be something like this:


6000

That works out to be around 4 days for the timeout, so all you need to do now is restart Mingle on the server and you shouldn’t be bothered by it any more.

In some projects, there are sometimes people that want to stay informed of what is happening without having to login to Mingle constantly.

One good example is someone that has to verify that work has been completed by the development team.

Our fictional customer, Sandy, is a busy person and would like a way to keep informed of when she needs to look at the work the development team has done so that she doesn’t get behind. She doesn’t have time to check Mingle all day and lives in email and feed readers all day.

Fortunately for Sandy, Mingle has a simple and powerful solution for her. By simply going to the History tab in Mingle, she can see all of what is going on in real time. But wait, there is too much information that Sandy doesn’t need to look at. Sandy needs to take a few steps to give her just what she needs with all of the steps highlighted in the image on the right.

# Sandy only wants to know what she needs to act on. She doesn’t care about updates to pages or code checkins. So clicking on the cards checkbox limits her search just to cards that are changing.
# This is still too much information, so she further narrows her choices down by selecting only to look at stories because she doesn’t need to know about defects.
# Her final choice is to select that the card changed to a story status of “In Customer Review” because that’s where she knows she’ll need to take some action and look at the work her team is doing.
# Sandy can then choose how she wants to stay informed via feed or email.

Mingle now keeps Sandy up to date on what she needs to review. She’s happy because she can keep up to date even while she’s out of the office.

I’ve been using Mingle a lot lately, so I’ll be posting some quick tips that I’ve found useful in my projects.

Did you know that you can add a set of quick links in the header of your project?

Mingle’s help pages show how it’s done, but oddly, the help page seems to be hard to navigate to unless you know what you are looking for. It’s under Content > Customizing Projects > Project Environment and Navigation > Setting Up Quick Header Links.

First, you’ll need to create a wiki page called Special:HeaderActions. That’s where you’ll store all of your links. Once you do that, you can enter in links like this:

<a href=”/projects/{{project}}/wiki/Project_Metrics” accesskey=”m”>Project Metrics</a>|

<a href=”/projects/{{project}}/cards/new?properties[status]=new&properties[type]=defect” accesskey=”b”>+Defect</a>

<a href=”/projects/{{project}}/cards/new?properties[status]=new&properties[type]=story” accesskey=”s”>+Story</a>

Save the wiki page with these new links and you’ll see new navigation links for your project that look something like this.

With the access keys we’ve put on the links, you can even use keyboard shortcuts to these new links.

Finally, I’d like to mention that currently Mingle is free for 5 users or less and that academic, open source, and non-profit projects can get a license to use it for larger teams for free too. Contact me directly or talk to the ThoughtWorks Studios team to get set up. We’ve even got people that will help you configure it to your team’s needs.

Science Daily is reporting today on new research from scientists at the University of Portsmouth says that says smiling affects how we speak, to the point that listeners can identify the type of smile based on sound alone. Here is the abstract for the paper:

The present study investigated the vocal communication of naturally occurring smiles. Verbal variation was controlled in the speech of 8 speakers by asking them to repeat the same sentence in response to a set sequence of 17 questions, intended to provoke reactions such as amusement, mild embarrassment, or just a neutral response. After coding for facial expressions, a sample of 64 utterances was chosen to represent Duchenne smiles, non-Duchenne smiles, suppressed smiles and non-smiles. These audio clips were used to test the discrimination skills of 11 listeners, who had to rely on vocal indicators to identify different types of smiles in speech. The study established that listeners can discriminate different smile types and further indicated that listeners utilize prototypical ideals to discern whether a person is smiling. Some acoustical cues appear to be taken by listeners as strong indicators of a smile, regardless of whether the speaker is actually smiling. Further investigations into listeners’ prototypical ideals of vocal expressivity could prove worthwhile for voice synthesizing technology endeavoring to make computer-simulations more naturalistic.

This is real science folks. Remember all those times you had to cold call and you heard “smile and dial” from your biz dev manager? Well, it turns out she was right. Your customer sub-consciously heard, not only that you weren’t smiling, but that you were gritting your teeth in anger.

Play to People’s Fantasies
The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

I recently got a Verizon USB720 for my MacBook Pro and installed the software that Verizon provides. I frequently use the Cisco VPN software to connect to my clients’ networks to do work and I also use Parallels to test software on Windows.

There’s a little known (as far as I can tell) interaction between the three, where the Cisco VPN won’t allow you to connect anywhere and if it does, only for a few seconds. To get this feature back, all you have to do is disable the network ports that Parallels creates for NAT networking when you’re connecting to the Verizon card.

Go to System Preferences > Network > Network Port Configurations and uncheck the boxes that say Parallels like the image below.

Once you do that, you’ll be able to connect to the VPN just fine.