Yesterday the event Barcelona ALM Open Space 2011 took place, organized by agile-barcelona. A big congratulations to the team, the event was very well organized and had a big success.

An A.L.M. event right in my own town was something I couldn’t miss. So, I prepared a demo of Jabox and a power-point with the basic ideas and went to the event to get some real feedback. As a side-bonus, I attended to an excellent open space where ideas about A.L.M. environments where discussed all day.

Some of the questions that were raised during the presentation were the following:

• How is Jabox going to be maintained, while versions of the integrated applications are going to evolve during time?

The problematic of integrating a big collection of applications exists by definition in the ALM suite.

While there are APIs that are lately being produced by each application in order to define better the external integration, there are always changes to the plans, evolution, deprecation and new technological trends that replace old ones.

Different open source communities are evolving their applications with their own pace, but integrations between those is only supported by their common subsets, making clear that these integrations are slower to react to changes.

The typical reaction to the problem is to install the base applications, install the integration plugins and by the method of trial-and-error find a workable solution. But this solution suffers because once you integrate everything, updating a specific application might break integrations, forcing updates to the integration plugins, which might force updates to other applications, creating a domino effect, and then finally your ALM suite is frozen to specific versions until some external reasons forces you to update, which is certainly not the best time to do it.

Jabox is trying to solve this problem by automating the deployment method. Once the deployment method is automated, the whole ALM suite can be reproduced in a few seconds. Even if new versions of applications or plugins are released, Jabox will continue deploying the specific versions that are previously tested to be integrated correctly.

As for updating your ALM suite, just update your jabox.

• How is Jabox being updated?

When new versions of Jabox are released, if there is a need of manual intervention for the upgrade to be done correctly, it will be described in the release notes. Since Jabox is still at early stages backwards compatibility is not on the top of the list. In any case, all data of the ALM suite are stored in ~/.jabox/ directory, before each update a backup is advised as best practice. Moreover, all integrated applications contain their own subdirectory inside ~/.jabox/ their data should work without any issues by jabox.