What are the advantages / disadvantages of permanent "jobs" over an external bug tracking system?

Question

I am trying to figure out which "jobs" provide an "external error tracking system" and simply put the error identifier in a validation comment.

I was hoping that the “work” could help with. How do I know if a branch contains a bug fix in Perforce?

Answer 1

Like bugtracker , Perforce's tasks are somewhat basic. They can be created and modified using the P4V GUI client or using p4 job and p4 jobs on the command line.

The idea is that they can serve as a link (a connector, as Perforce calls it, or an interface, as a developer can look at it) to a third-party release management system and basically provide information that has been changed by a list of changes, for what problem, then the system Problem Management can use this information using the Perforce Defect Tracking Gateway (PDF documentation is here ) and generate charts or error statistics for management or something else.

We have been using this with Jira in both directions with some success. The basics worked almost completely out of the box, more complex use cases (for example, what errors were the fixes that they were released in?) Or integration with other bugtrackers may require a change in the Perforce working model .

One of the advantages over tracking change lists and release numbers using commit comments is that you can select a task / problem from the drop-down list when you commit the change list with P4V.

In practice, developers tend to forget to add job information when they record a list of changes. This can be accomplished using Perforce triggers .

Answer 2

Nothing. Take it from someone who has experienced years of aggravation while working with Perforce / FogBugz integration mechanisms (the last of which is the Perforce Defect Tracking Gateway, which uses Perforce jobs as part of the integration). They provide very little return on significant investments on time by installing them, and then try to understand what went wrong when they stopped working (which is often).

Now I do what you offer. I simply put the FogBugz case number in the Perforce validation comment, and then add this Perforce change list to the FogBugz case when resolving it. As simple and reliable as it gets.

Answer 3

We put the problem identifier in the comment, but we also have a Perforce trigger that updates the problem database (JIRA) with the change list number. During the next build, the automatic build process also updates the problem with the actual build number.

A very pleasant part of this implantation is that the trigger gives an error if the problem is not marked as running, or the developer performing the registration does not work on this problem. Therefore, it rarely happens that the error identification number has missed a check.