Software Development Management Tools Working Group

This working group has a shared interest in tools being used for managing a SW development project - including tools for version control, issue tracking, documentation, etc.

Members

• Arne Styve
• Hallvard Trætteberg
• Michael Tollefsen
• Rune Hjelsvold
• Simon McCallum

Classes of tools

Code repository

A code repository provides the possibility to share code, create versions (time- and tag-based) and branches (topic-based). There are typically two levels of organisation: repositories and organisation (often called group or project). The repository is where the code is stored, and any user will typically be able to create new repositories and grant other uses access. An organisation may be defined as the owner of several repositories, so they can be more easily managed by the organisation. E.g. a course (emne) may the organisation which manages repositories, one for each student project group.

Examples are git and mercurial (core systems), github (cloud provider), gitlab (software and cloud provider), Stash/Bitbucket from Atlassian (software and cloud provider), ...

Issue tracking

Issues are a way of managing development tasks based on requirements spanning from feature requests to bug reports. Issues can be entered by both developers, e.g. as a feature to develop in a sprint, or users, e.g. as feature requests or bug reports. Issues typically go through phases and may are assigned to people. Branches and commits often refer to issues.

Systems for issue tracking may be both integrated and standalone. Examples are github and gitlab (integrated), Jira from Atlasssian (standalone, but integrated with other Atlassian products), bugzilla (standalone), ...

Continuous integration (CI)

CI is a general term for building, testing and deploying the system you are developing, mainly to ensure it's quality, but also to automatically roll out new versions. CI is often automated by tools like ant, maven and gradle. These tools can be run locally, and/or on specialised servers that run build jobs on server farms. The advantage is both making builds independent of the individual developers and scaling to large systems. The build jobs may be triggered manually or automatically, when new code is committed and pushed to a code repository.