Am nearly at the end of my testing with Octopus, and am pleased to say it looks like it’s going to do the job for us really well, especially when some of the features discussed recently make it into the build.
Will be getting my boss to stump up for a licence pretty soon I hope!
However, in the process I’ve found a few minor things that would help with the usability of the product, and I thought I’d list them here. None of these actually stop me getting the work done, but would be great to have smoothed out and would help with that ‘polished’ feel.
(of course this is all just my opinion so feel free to disregard as required!)
- Variable management is getting messy, and I currently only have a few machines/environments. There are a few things that would help here:
a) Ability to filter the variable list by environment, or by machine, or by both. A couple of dropdowns and some show/hide in jquery would be sufficient. Or maybe a jquery carousel so I can scroll between all the environments for this project, seeing what variables are set for each?
b) I have a bunch of variables that need setting for each environment/machine combination. It’d be really useful to be able to set these up as a group that each environment/machine requires for this project, and be able to duplicate the whole set when I add a new environment/machine.
Ideally with a nifty interface that I could tab between just setting the new values for each variable. Currently the workflow for this requires a lot of duplicate, click, wait, type, click, repeat.
This would be a per-project group. For bonus points, make it so that project CAN’T be deployed to an environment unless all of these variables have been set, as that would send my scripts haywire and who knows what might happen!
c) Put ‘delete’ next to Edit/Duplicate, as I’ve often had to remove variables that turned out to be unnecessary while writing my scripts. Now they’re written that is less important, but having to click, wait, click to delete was a little frustrating.
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As I’ve been testing I’ve accumulated a backlog of test releases that are now all nonsense and clutter. It’d be nice to be able to clear the history of a project, deleting all the releases and deployment history, so I can start afresh now I’ve got it all working.
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Really trivial one this, but I’ve often found myself on the deployment screen pressing F5 to watch the output happening in realtime. Could there perhaps be a checkbox set to allow this page to auto-update - just pulling down the latest output and appending it would be excellent? This would be a great help to my sense of laziness.
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On the Project page some of my environments have quite long names, and overlap one another. I’ve found lowering the font-size on #middle #body table.release-matrix thead td {} makes it much more readable.
You’re doing a great job, and even with these little kinks (and the slightly bigger ones discussed elsewhere) this is a fab product - looking forward to v1!