29 Apr 05

Tracking Bugs, Cradle to Grave

Rich Freedman wrote in with an overview of the tools his team uses to automate the traceability from a bug report to the file changes that squashed the bug. He writes:

We’ve made the bug-fixing process more transparent and bug-fix code reviews much easier to do by integrating CVS, CVSweb, Bugzilla, and JSPWiki. Here’s how it works:

  1. Programmers put "Bug: xxxx" in the first line of the CVS commit message. A Perl script updates the specified bug report in Bugzilla with the programmer’s name, the commit message, the file names, and hyperlinks to CVSWeb that display the diffs for each file committed. This allows the project lead to access the diffs for any bug fix directly from Bugzilla.
  2. We created a Perl script that runs on the same server as Bugzilla and, on demand, creates an RSS file containing information about updates to Bugzilla for a specified project and number of days (we default to the last 10 days). We then used a JSPWiki RSS plugin that we had previously written to display this information in each project’s wiki page.

This is another great example of effective automation made possible by connecting existing tools with little dabs of glue.

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