issue tracking

Table of Contents

• Issue-Tracking
  • Related Questions
  • Best practices
    • Appropriate classification of issues
    • Link commits with issues

Issue-Tracking

Issue-tracking is the SCM discipline of identifying and persistently storing issues (problem tickets, change-requests, etc.) with their metadata and thread of communications for the purpose of tracking the possible long-term evolution, state transition and assignment of the issues.

Related Questions

• What is the status of an issue?

• Who is responsible for it?

• Which software version contained the bug and when was it fixed?

• When is something scheduled to be fixed?

Best practices

For issue-tracking you should follow these best-practices:

Appropriate classification of issues

Define adequate metadata for your issue-tracking model and ensure that issues are properly classified. However, if there is low acceptance to provide the data, then less could be more.

Ensure that the meta-model of your issue-tracking matches your project requirements. In particular, verify that you have the right options for the following classifications:

• Issue-type (bug, change-request, task, etc.)

• Summary (brief title)

• Description (explanation how to reproduce the bug or description of the feature to build with rationale and acceptance criteria)

• Affected and fixed version

• Issue-state and according workflow

Link commits with issues

Define a simple but strict rule on how to link commit messages to your version-control with associated issues of your issue-tracking.

The history of version-control and the history of issue-tracking contain important information. Maximum value comes out of it, if they both are connected. E.g. for reviewing commits, it typically saves a lot of time if the related issue is known. This should be done by mapping commits with issues through their unique ID. Modern integrated tools support linking issues with commits if simple rules are met (issue ID in commit message). A typicaly template for a commit message looks as following:

#«issue-id»: «describe your change»

In an ideal situation, you never have any commit without an issue-association. However, you have to consider, what is efficient and good enough for your project.