Proget: Documentation of 2024 Projects Preview feature

sebastian...

Hi there,

I was wondering if there is some documentation of the 2024 preview feature "Projects" within the SCA reports available. I found this new entry in the documentation, but I doesn't really answer my questions (yet). At the moment, the article basically just says that stages exist, but doesn't really go into details.

Here are some of the things I was wondering about:
What's the actual effect of a version being in one of the predefined stages? Am I correct in assuming that only active builds and versions in the "Production" stage are being analyzed? What's the effect of a version being in "Test" or "Integration"? What's the number of versions/builds per stage? We usually have several versions in production (i.e. customers use them in production) at the same time, but it seems that promoting a build to "Production" will move older builds to "Archive" (allowing only 2 build in Production). Is there a way to prevent this or increase the number of builds per stage? The article also mentioned that it would be possible to define our own stages, but I couldn't find that option yet (using ProGet 2023.31).

rhessinger

Hi @sebastian,

Thanks for asking this. We will definitely explain this better in our docs prior to the launch of ProGet 2024. Basically, the concept of build stages was a way to track your project through it's build lifecycle. Since the scan needs to be performed against the source code, a build is typically added at you CI server's build stage. Then the version will be promoted between stages until it is released. During this process, there are typically multiple CI builds that are created and then rejected before going to release. ProGet's build stages give you the ability to automatically handle archiving old versions and determine at what stage an automated build analysis should create issues.

With all that said, you can customize these build stages by navigating to Reporting & SCA -> Projects and then hover over the multi-button in the upper right corner and select "Build Stages". From there, you can modify the settings for how builds are handled in each stage (scan for issues, number of active builds to keep, etc...) and create new build stages to match your CI/CD process.

ProGet includes 4 stages out of the box and they are configured to do the following by default:

Build: Archive other builds except the latest 10.
Integration: Archive other builds except the latest 3.
Test: Archive other builds except the latest 3 and create issues for noncompliant packages.
Production: Archive other builds except the latest 1 and create issues for noncompliant packages.

I hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Rich

sebastian...

@rhessinger said in Proget: Documentation of 2024 Projects Preview feature:

With all that said, you can customize these build stages by navigating to Reporting & SCA -> Projects and then hover over the multi-button in the upper right corner and select "Build Stages".

Thanks @rhessinger, this is what I was looking for! Looking at settings page really helps understanding what they are doing.

I have one follow-up question: There is an option called Set status of promoted build to "Released" at the stages' settings page, but it does not seem to be set on any of the four predefined stages. What's the effect of that option?

rhessinger

Hi @sebastian,

That option can be ignored. We have decided to remove that option from the feature because it was only something that changed a UI color and had no real affect on the operation. It looks like we missed it in that UI. We will remove that in an upcoming release of ProGet.

Thanks,
Rich