An apparently mundane task with significant impact on

• maintenance cost

• customer satisfaction

• project personnel management

Basic Questions

Roles in an Issue Tracking System

• Users (internal or external to the project team) report problems

• Project administrators prioritize problems and assign some to project staff

• Project staff report on status of problem solution

What Questions Does an Issue Tracking System Answer??

• What problems are currently open?
  • Is anyone working on these problems?
  • What’s their status?

• Which of those are the most severe?

• Have similar problems been reported in the past?

What is tracked?

• Which release(s) does the problem occur in?

• What are the environmental factors?
  • Operating system
  • 3rd party software
• Problem history
  • Can the problem be reproduced? How?

• Expected behavior

• Observed behavior

Open Alternatives

• Bugzilla was one the earliest well-known such systems
  • Defined much of the feature set and organization still used by its successors
• Commonly integrated into Forges to take advantage of infrastructure already provided for project management
  • particularly personnel mgmt.

1. Bugzilla

• Originally for Mozilla/Netscape project (1998)
  • Major updates have continued through 2011 (v4.0)

Bugzilla Problem Report

Bugzilla Classifies Problems by

• Severity
  • Blocker (a.k.a Showstopper): blocks development or testing
  • Critical: crashes, loss of data
  • Major: loss of important functionality
  • Normal
  • Minor: minor functionality loss and/or a workaround is available
  • Trivial: e.g., misspelled messages
  • Enhancement: request for new features
• Priority
  • Numeric, assigned by project managers

Bugzilla also Tracks

• Comments (forum-style)

• Notifications desired

The Life-Cycle of a Problem

What Goes into the System?

• Problems can be reported by end-users or team members

• Team members will generally not enter simple test failures
  • “Test cases make problems reports obsolete”
  • Unless the fix is outside their personal area of responsibility or they want someone else to step in

• Team members may use to track ideas and feature requests

2. Other Systems

Forges

Most forge systems integrate some form of issue tracking

• Already provide personnel management

• E.g., FusionForge provides separate tracking of bug reports and feature requests
  • Provides for attachment of files (test cases)
  • Assignment of a report to a project member generates a task in that person’s to-do list
  • Can track scm commits that fix problem via Tracker links on SCM pages

** Other Possibilities**

• Search capabilities vary widely

• Some systems link problem reports to regression tests

• More general project task managers exist
  • E.g., Agile developers allocate “stories”

3. Eclipse - Mylyn

• Personal & shared task manager for Eclipse
  • Generally included with most programming language support packages
• Mylyn supports two kinds of tasks
  • Local tasks, stored in the Eclipse workspace
  • Shared tasks, from an issue tracking system or project task manager
    • e.g., Bugzilla, github, FusionForge

• Mylyn distinguishes between due dates and schedule dates

MyLyn and Project Perspectives

1. personal task list, including Bugzilla reports

2. Change set related to task

3. Task editor

4. Context-based task info

Working with an Issue-Tracking System

• Add a connector to the issue tracker
  • GitLab connector at Eclipse update site http://pweingardt.github.com/mylyn-gitlab

• Define one or more queries indicting what issue reports you want to be displayed by mylyn
  • E.g., in OurProject, display all reports assigned to me as tasks
• Select a task to update info (will synchronize with remote manager)
  • Or create new tasks

Task List

• Can display by category/query or by date
  • Searching & filtering are possible
  • “Focus on work week” option
• Color changes indicate scheduling & status
  • red for overdue tasks
  • blue for tasks scheduled for today
  • black for tasks scheduled for later in the week
  • green for tasks completed today
  • grey for tasks completed earlier

Context Management

• The context of a task is the collection of files & information related to the task.
  • E.g., Java files related to a bug
  • Changes made in the course of fixing it

• When you activate a task, Eclipse/Mylyn tracks the context

• The Focus on Active Task button causes the package explorer to show only elements in the active task’s context

Establishing Context

• From the task list, activate a task.
  • The package explorer switches to “Focus on Active Task” mode
    • If you are starting work on this task, this is empty

    Clear by releasing the Focus on Active Task button or alt-clicking to expand an element in the explorer tree.

• Start working

  • As you open files directly from the package manager, or indirectly (e.g., using Show Declaration (F3), \command{Open Type} (Ctrl-Shift-T), or Show References (Ctrl-Shift-G), they are added to the focused package manager view.

Restoring Context

• You can deactivate the currently active task (or activate a different task that you want to switch to).
  • Your various open editor windows close and the package manager returns to its normal unfocused state
• You “return” to a task by re-activating it.
  • Your editor windows for that task context are restored

Contexts and Tests

• You can create a Context Test Suite of those JUnit tests that you will be frequently re-running as you work on your active task.

Contexts and Change Sets

Changes made while working on an activated tasks are checked

• Change sets can be manipulated in the synchronize view
  • CVS & Subversion
  • Said to work with Egit, but I’m not seeing it in practice

Machine Hopping

• A major limitation (IMO) of the Mylyn context support is its limitation to a single workspace
  • I frequently work on the same project on different machines (office and home)
• Things I have yet to try
  • Exporting and importing of tasks
    • Not clear if context is included
  • Changing the task list data directory to a dropbox folder