Frequently Asked Questions

Please see System Requirements (Server) and System Requirements (Clients) for this information.

Yes, Ketura works with both Mac OS X and Windows. Just download the right version for your chosen platform. Whether you install Ketura on Windows or Mac OS X, you can connect to it from both Windows and Mac clients.

Evaluation and preview versions of Ketura are licensed for a limited period of time (typically 45 days) from installation, as specified by the licence file supplied with the product.

Full (non-evaluation) versions of Ketura are licensed per user who accesses a Ketura server. That is, you need to purchase one licence for each user who will log on to a particular Ketura server. Users who are permitted to log on are known as ‘active users’ within the product.

You do not need to purchase a licence for users that will not be logging on to Ketura. Thus, for example, you can use Ketura to manage external contractors (who do not need access to Ketura themselves) without purchasing additional user licences.

Please see the Legal Notices and End-User Licence Agreement for Ketura Server Software topics for full terms and conditions.

Yes. When someone leaves, you would mark the relevant account as ‘inactive’ within Ketura, thereby freeing up the user licence for someone else. All of the historical information (work done, etc) for the newly-inactive user remains in Ketura (unless you specifically delete it), so no information is lost when you do this.

In general, you only need a licence for each each user who is marked as active (and thereby able to log on) within Ketura at a particular point in time. Thus, if you have a contractor with you for three months, who then leaves, you simply mark that contractor as inactive in Ketura. You would then be free to use that contractor’s Ketura user licence for someone else.

Please see Ketura price list section on the purchasing page.

No. Once your initial support/updates period expires, your Ketura installation will remain fully-functional whether or not you choose renew support. However, you will need to renew if you subsequently wish to obtain technical support, or if you wish to be able to use releases of Ketura made after your support expired.

Renewing support is inexpensive (currently equivalent to less than $0.22 / day per user), and an extremely cost-effective way to continue to take advantage of the latest Ketura developments.

For more information, see Araxis Ketura Support and Updates Policy.

Please see price list on the purchasing page.

The Araxis Ketura Support and Updates Policy page might also be of interest.

No, but it is strongly recommended as, without it, you will not be entitled to further product updates or technical support. Please Contact Araxis for a quotation if you wish to purchase additional licences without support.

Please see Installing a Licence File After you Have Purchased Ketura for this information.

No.

Some older licence files were machine-specific; existing customers wishing to replace those may Contact Araxis for an update.

Having licences be independent of specific machines means that you can, if you wish, try out new versions of Ketura, before production deployment, on a separate machine to your main Ketura server. You can also have a backup Ketura server ready and available in case your main machine fails.

The Quick Start Checklist answers this question for typical Ketura installations.

Yes, unless explicitly instructed otherwise. Using the Back button can be confusing as you can end up viewing out-of-date pages and forms with old data. Whenever possible, use Ketura navigation features such as the navigation trail at the top of each page, the Recent pages list in the sidebar and the global navigation tabs.

Some modern web browsers can save you typing by offering previously used responses when you are completing text entry fields. Ketura does not interfere with such functionality, but you may need explicitly to turn this on for forms in your web browser before it will be offered to you.

Yes, and this can significantly increase your productivity with Ketura.

In Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 (on Windows), holding down the Ctrl key when you click a link will open that link in a new tab. In Safari (on Mac OS X), the same thing is accomplished by holding down the Apple key. For other browsers, consult the browser’s documentation to find out how to open a link in a separate browser tab.

Browsers usually duplicate the session information when you open an additional browser window from an existing one (for example, by pressing Ctrl+N in Internet Explorer). If you subsequently log off from one browser window and then log on as a separate user, you may find that you have also caused the logged on user to change in the other browser window. To avoid this, open the second browser window by starting a fresh instance of the browser (that is, start and run two copies of the browser side-by-side instead of opening a second window from an existing browser window).

Yes. When you navigate to such a bookmark, you will be asked to log on if you are not already logged on and if you have not asked to be automatically logged on.

Yes, provided your colleague has an account on your Ketura system and has permission to view the page in question. When your colleague navigates to the URL that you have sent, your colleague will be asked to log on (if necessary) before the page can be viewed.

Starting numbering from 1000 ensures that issue and task ids, widely used as links, are long enough to easily click. In our early usability testing, we found that it was difficult to reliably click on hyperlinks of fewer than four characters.

Yes. It is possible to filter the list of issues on an issue topic page (global Topics tab > Topic name link > Issues tab) by issues not in any milestones. This makes it easy to locate issues that are not in any milestone. Search results can also be filtered in this way.

If you are managing a product or project that has particular release cycles (for example, a software application), you are probably creating a series of internal product ‘builds’ or versions, each moving closer towards the ultimate goal. Eventually, you will create a ‘notable’ build that is ready for a wider release. At this point, a list of all of the issues resolved in the new release (relative to the previous such notable release) is typically required. There are two basic approaches that you can use to enable Ketura to provide you with this information:

1. Complete the Fixed in version and build number for each issue that is resolved. The Fixed in information can be enabled on a per issue topic basis. If this information is provided for each issue, you can then perform an advanced search for issues fixed in a particular build.

   This approach tends to be quite error prone, as it relies on engineers properly updating issues with the Fixed in information. Within Araxis, we do add such information to each of our completed issues, but it is purely for the benefit of our test team, so that they know whether a particular issue has been fixed in the product build that they are testing.

   Another drawback is that there may be many interim internal releases made (each with a different version/build number) for each public product release. Consequently, it might be necessary to perform several searches to be sure that all of the issues comprising a notable release are found. Although it can work, this approach is not therefore recommended.

2. Create a single project milestone for each and every notable release that you make. This assumes that you have created a Ketura project for the product you are managing. You simply create a separate milestone on that project for each notable release, populating it with the issues to be addressed in that release. To see what issues have been fixed in a particular release, you can then just look at the appropriate milestone’s issue list.

   For example, within Araxis, we might have a milestone ‘M12 - Next release’ in our ‘Ketura Development’ project. That would contain all the issues (and only the issues) that we intend to address in the next product release. Once the final release has been made, we would rename the milestone with that release’s version number. So, the M12 milestone might be renamed ‘M12 - 2007.1203 Release’. When it came to creating the notes for that release, we would only need to look at the issue list for that milestone. The issue list can be exported as a csv file (which can be opened by various applications, such as Microsoft Excel), making it very easy to cut and paste the information into our release documentation.

   This approach has many benefits. Since Ketura offers work and cost breakdowns by milestone, you can see instantly how much work (and money) goes into each notable release that you make. (Within Araxis, we even create an issue in the milestone for managing the release, and also for testing it, so that we capture all of the time that goes into it.) You can also see how much work is left until the next release will be ready. Even better, Ketura’s built-in scheduling abilities mean that you can see a predicted completion date.

   Because a single project or release manager is typically responsible for adding or removing issues to the milestone, this approach is also reliable. It doesn’t depend upon individual engineers remembering to update particular issues with release information.

   Using a milestone for each notable release is also very flexible, since you can easily move unresolved issues into and out of the milestone (see Ketura Tour Step 5: Keeping Projects On-Track for various ways to do this), if your plans for the release need to change.

Yes.

As discussed above (in How can I obtain a list of issues related to a particular release of a product or project that I am managing with Ketura?), there are many advantages to having a separate milestone for each notable product release that you make. However, that approach assumes a linear development model in which a particular issue is addressed in one, and only one, such release milestone. If you maintain multiple, parallel, versions of your product (for example, for a software product targeting different platforms), it might be that you fix an issue in one version, and then apply that same fix to a parallel version. Ketura can accommodate such practices straightforwardly.

Let’s say that you have two parallel versions of a product, A and B. You have separate milestones for the next release of each of those versions, called ‘A – Next Release’ and ‘B – Next Release’. You have an issue which is present on milestone ‘A – Next Release’, which has been resolved. The changes for that issue have also been applied to product version B, and you’d like the issue list of milestone ‘B – Next Release’ to reflect that fact, not least because doing so would make it much easier to produce comprehensive release notes when the next notable release of product version B is made.

To record such information, simply create an issue with a summary such as ‘Issue fixes from other milestones’. This will be used to keep track of any issues from product version A milestones whose fixes are also applied to your next release of product version B. Therefore, add this new issue to your ‘B – Next Release’ milestone. Then, each time you apply a fix from an issue in milestone ‘A – Next Release’ to product version B, add that issue as a related issue (using the Related issue tab) to your ‘Issue fixes from other milestones’ issue. Those related issues will thus form the complete record of fixes applied from issues in other milestones.

This approach works well. It directly models your actions (fixing an issue in one product version, then applying that fix elsewhere). It is easily extensible to any number of parallel product versions. It has the benefit that you don’t double count the work effort (and associated cost) put into resolving an issue whose fix is then applied to multiple product releases. Of course, you might wish to record the time taken to apply the issue fix to the second product version, and this can be done by logging time to ‘Apply fix’ tasks created on the ‘Issue fixes from other milestones’ issue.

You can create an issue type called ‘Requirement’, and then simply create an issue of that type for each of your requirements.

It is often helpful to gather related requirements together into a ‘Planning’ or ‘Requirements’ milestone on a particular project. You can then see all the requirements for a project by looking at the relevant milestone.

The System Administrator account that you created during installation has the user id ‘admin’. Log on with this id and the associated password that you provided during installation. The Installing a Ketura Server topic discusses this further.

You have probably mistyped the user id or password. When Ketura is first installed, an account with user id ‘admin’ and the password specified during setup is created, so try using this account.

If you think you might have forgotten the password to the ‘admin’ account, you could uninstall Ketura and re-install (with a clean database) to re-create the Ketura database with a new password for the built-in ‘admin’ account. Be warned that this will erase any data that you might already have stored in your Ketura database.

The probable cause is that you don’t have cookies enabled on your web browser for Ketura. This is likely to be a security or privacy setting in your browser’s preferences.

If enabling cookies in your web browser doesn’t help, please check to see whether you have any Internet security or firewall software (other than the built-in firewall on Windows XP, Windows Vista or Mac OS X) installed on your machine, as it is conceivable that this might be interfering in some way. You need to configure any such product to allow access to the Ketura server on your local machine, and to allow cookies, JavaScript and so on for that server. For ZoneAlarm Pro, this will involve adding an entry in the sites section for the local machine.

You are probably running an Internet security product, such as ZoneAlarm Pro. You need to configure any such product to allow access to the Ketura server on your local machine, and to allow cookies, JavaScript and so on for that server. For ZoneAlarm Pro, this will involve adding an entry in the sites section for the local machine.

Carefully check the URL you are using. Ketura urls are case sensitive, so it is important to use the the correct character case (upper or lower). This is particularly true of the word Ketura, if it appears in the URL, which must start with a capital letter ‘K’.

Please also see Logging on to Ketura Using a Web Browser.

Please see Logging on to Ketura Using a Web Browser.

If that doesn’t help, see Configuring your computer’s firewall in the Installing a Ketura Server topic.

For best results when printing Ketura pages, configure your browser to print background colours and images. In Internet Explorer 6.0, this setting can be found by choosing Internet Options...from the Tools menu and selecting the Advanced tab in the property sheet that appears. In Firefox, this is an option on the Page Setup dialog.

Ketura uses JavaScript events generated by your web browser to know when to enable (and disable) certain form buttons. Unfortunately, current versions of Safari don’t seem to generate any suitable events when text is pasted into a form field. To work around this problem, press the Tab after pasting a value into a form field. This will move the input focus to a different form control, and in the process enable any form buttons that should be enabled.

You probably have cookies disabled in your browser. Normally, Ketura stores cookies on your browser to remember which tab on each page is selected. If cookies are disabled, Ketura is unable to do this. To solve the problem, re-enable cookies on your browser.

No, but we encourage you instead to link to the Ketura home page at http://www.araxis.com/ketura/.

If you run a web site, we encourage you to link to the Araxis web site. You don't need to ask permission first, but we would appreciate a quick email to sales@araxis.com to tell us about your link.

To avoid any danger of broken links, please link only to http://www.araxis.com/, http://www.araxis.com/ketura/ or one of our other product home pages.