Eclipse-Bugzilla (/Trac/JIRA) Integration

The thing that most struck me about the Visual Studio demo at the last Lunch and Learn was that at commit point in the IDE we could bring up the bug on a task list, and by checking it off both mark it as fixed in the bug tracking software and automatically grab the short description of the bug and add it to the commit statement. Since I’ve become such a fan of not forcing programmers to retype or even manually copy-and-paste pre-existing documentation, this seemed like something we really should have for Eclipse.

And the Mylar Eclipse plugin already does it. It does a whole bunch of other things as well, like identifying sets of files that you touch as part of a task (be it a new feature or a bug fix), and not only allowing you to limit your view while working on a task to those files, but also remembering that set so if you need to reopen the task (or bug) later, instead of dealing with all of the files in the app, you can zero in on the specific files that were changed as part of the original implementation. (It also lets you keep notes on a bug which are attached to the bug report within Eclipse and so can be shared among developers but are not published back to Bugzilla, which can be useful if that would send email to people on different teams.)

People more into project management than development would probably also appreciate that the task focus, which makes it incredibly easy to put the task whiteboard in an Eclipse window, makes it easier to plan work weeks and harder to ignore or hide the tasks that start out at half a day and then snowball.

Has anyone used this in anger? (I see that Alistair and the TestCreek team have been aware of it for some time.) Because it looks really really neat to me, and an utterly compelling reason to update Bugzilla…

It's only fair to share...
Share on Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn

Leave a Reply