*this is the BLAH BLAH. To download the goodies try this post*

I was over in Perth last week and a couple of things happened. One is I caught up with Nick Randolph and we had a chat about integrating Subversion and Gemini. The second is I came to the conclusion that I had kinda been neglecting the technical side of my blog- too much politicking for me. So I'm going to try and be a little more tech focused over the next few months.

But anyway. Onto the topic of the post. We have some stuff here @ Kognition that we have implemented to allow us to link our version controll system (Subversion) with our Issue Management system (Gemini). What it allows us to do is have the check in comments from version control entered against issues into our issue control system to close the development/debug loop. We also have some stuff to allow us to integrate issue reporting directly into our applications for exceptions that are thrown.

Here is some stuff from our CTO, Nick Head on how it all fits together. It was put together by Nick and Simon 'Skip' Gardiner... I'm just a lowly user of the system

“its pretty easy to implement once you know the API's etc. We have two internal tools we have developed for integrating Gemini and SVN: an exception management framework for reporting bugs to Gemini, and an SVN post-commit hook so that comments and file modifications can be logged against the correct work item in Gemini.

The first one is a no-brainer - we just have a form that pops up whenever an unhandled exception ocurrs. All projects contain a project ID matching up with the Gemini project. We query the Gemini WS for the project's components, display them as a drop down, and let the user enter any additional repro details for the bug. Then when they hit submit, we get the full stack trace of the error, enabling us to fix the bug much faster than we would previously.

The next tool is a C# command line app that we install in the post-commit folder on our SVN server. This gets invoked on every commit. If the dev adds a bug ID in the comment in the format #nnn we know that its related to an issue in Gemini. We get the commit's revision number, query SVN for the comment and the changed files, then using the Gemini WS we add a comment to the issue.

I love that last little tool - means we have an effective way of tracking what files were modified for each issue.

We've thought about releasing these tools with an open source BSD license, but we just don't have the time at the moment to productify them (e.g clean up the code) and make them generic enough for use by other parties.

Actually, screw it - we will release the tools.”