Friday, April 29, 2011

Mediawiki + Bugzilla + SVN + SCMBug + Tweaks = Software Manager's recipe

It was fun trying to integrate SVN, Bugzilla and Mediawiki using SCMBug and BugzillaReports. The integrated system is really an efficiency booster and considering how easy it was to set up the value/effort ratio was well worth it. I am listing the steps needed to set this system up on Windows here which makes things very interesting sometimes. Linux install is similar and simpler.

  1. The first step was installing Apache, PHP and Active Perl on Windows. This is straightforward and well documented.

  2. Install MySQL

  3. Install Bugzilla. This is straightforward as well. Bugzilla uses Perl.

  4. Install Mediawiki.

  5. Turn off caching in Mediawiki. With caching on, you get stale data on bugs which can lead you to make wrong decisions.

  6. Install the Mediawiki - BugzillaReports Addon. This gives the ability to write short scripts in mediawiki which query bugzilla and present data on a web page as a reports. This itself takes you from zero to fifty.

  7. Set up backup scripts for MySQL.

  8. Install SVN

  9. Collabnet worked out pretty well.

    1. Set up Backup scripts for SVN

  10. Create custom fields in Bugzilla for recording code change list

  11. Install SCMBug

  12. Customize code in SCMBug. This will help:

    1. Format the regular expression for parsing out the bug ID from the comments.
    2. Change code to post changes to custom field instead of comments. SCMBug by default posts changes to Bugzilla comments which can be very annoying to users.