LabVIEW Interoperability with Industry Software for Managing Issues, Projects, and Code Reviews

[Jeff M]

Recently I've talked to companies that are already using LabVIEW and their organization has standardized on tools such as JIRA for bug tracking/project tracking as part of an organization-wide initiative.  JIRA connects to other IDEs/programming tools such as VisualStudio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc.  Atlassian (the company that makes JIRA) also provides tools that can part of a larger Agile process and can facilitate code reviews and other software development processes.

The idea up for vote is to offer more comprehensive LabVIEW interoperability with industry standard tools such as JIRA, or other software as part of an internal software design process.  (feel free to specify a certain tool, if you have a preference)

[tst]

I certainly agree with the sentiment, but it would also help to have a concrete example. I understand that LV already has the ability to integrate with Requirements Gateway, although I've never seen it in action. Can you use that mechanism and expand it to other tools? What would it look like in practice?

[Drew.Rankin]

One of the more frustrating things about providing the integration is the additional plugins that might be required of your industry standard product. For example, I recently discovered that I can integrate with MS Team Foundation Server only if I have one of several MS TFS products installed already (Visual Studio Team Edition, Team Explorer, Team Foundation Server) and apply the appropriate SCC provider interface extension. 

Currently, I am using TortoiseSVN for SCC and am very happy with its functionality; however, I have not taken full advantage of JKI's tool kit for Tortoise. Having this tool integrated natively would be a great start.

[Jeff M]

tst - I haven't put a lot of thought into how it would look in practice.  A first step would be to capture the different use-cases and biggest gaps.  For example, a specific request that was mentioned to me was: "ability to save and/or print VI diff logs so that they can be attached to the bug fix/change request"  

But generally speaking the integration experience may be similar to how Requirements Gateway works:  http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3721  In other words, it would aim to streamline the workflow from the LabVIEW developer's experience to the other tool, through menu integration and other hooks. 

[PaulLotz]

Just a note: If you want to capture for a JIRA which VIs changed for that issue, you can do this by setting up FishEye to pull this information when you check in code.

As an example, when I check changes in Subversion, I just put at the beginning of the check-in comment: For <COMPONENT>-<123>, or whatever the relevant JIRA issue is.  In a minute or two the JIRA issue updates with my check-in comment and the details (including the files I added, changed, or deleted).