AgileZen Notify

AgileZen Notify is a daemon that creates custom RSS feeds and sends mails for the AgileZen project management service.

AgileZen is a great tool, but currently it lacks customizable notification capabilities (when enabled, you get a mail for each single change...).

AgileZen Notify allows your team to define who should get notified of what – either through mail or RSS feeds. You can also notify other applications through a webhook HTTP request. Notify is implemented in Python. It listens to the XMPP stream of AgileZen and reads data from their REST API. Notify is designed to be customizable and extensible.

(AgileZen is copyright Rally Software Development Corp.)

Features

Currently implemented are the following outputs:

• Mail (both plain and rich text)
• RSS feeds (atom format)
• Webhooks (notifies other apps via HTTP)

Through custom rules you can define wich feeds should be created and when to send mails to whom.

Rule examples:

• When a story is moved to the ready queue (newly created or moved from backlog), send a mail to all active members except for the creator
• When a story is marked as being blocked, send a mail to everyone
• When a story is completed, send a mail to the creator
• For each project create an RSS feed

Mails and RSS feed items not only show the change message (e.g., "Story X was moved from Ready to Working") but they include the full story details, including the discussion. The formatting supports markdown.

Notify allows you to easily:

• create new rules
• define sets of recipients
• create new handlers

Installation

Requires Python >= 2.6

1. Clone this project
2. Download and install SleekXMPP
3. Download and install Feedgenerator
4. Optional: set up a web server to serve the RSS feeds. They are written to the path specified in notify.cfg (e.g., feeds/).

Setup

1. Create a gmail account for the Notify bot. It has to be an actual @gmail account, Google Apps for your domain accounts won’t work unless you do this.
2. In AgileZen, under settings, go to the Notifications tab. Enable a “Google Talk / XMPP” Channel Type and set the username to yournewaccount@gmail.com. Check “Send me notifications for actions I perform”.
3. Login to your new gmail account and add notifications@jabber.agilezen.com as a contact on google talk
4. Create an AgileZen API key (go to the Developer tab)
5. Configure notify.cfg (you need the google account login and the API key which you created in the steps above)
6. Start Notify by executing ./run (logs are written to run.log)

Customization

Check out the creation and of the handler instances and rules in src/rules.py and adapt them according to your team's needs.

The mail addresses of people are automatically pulled from the API and hence don't need to be configured.

The rules allow for defining who gets mail notifications (not everyone with access to a project also needs toget informed about each single change). The notion of active members is to select only the people of a project that have the role Members.

Here's an example of a role configuration in AgileZen (tab "Poeple"):

• Role Administrator: just the person who administrates the project
• Role Members: all team members that actively work on the project and want to get mails
• Stakeholders: other involved people who don't need detailed notifications

Like this one can easily define who gets mails by moving people between the roles Members and Stakeholders.

Unit tests

To run the unit tests you need the mock framework Mock.

Run all tests with nosetests if you have nose installed.

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2011 Adrian Lienhard adrian@cmsbox.com;

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.