Issue & Story Tracking

Everywhere that I’ve ever worked at had a defect tracking system, requirements system, and sometimes merged into one. Some were off the shelf, some were homemade, and others were services. I never felt the need to install one for work, but I did want to see what was involved with doing this, including how to integrate it with other products in the test stack.

I didn’t look around much for an open source solution. I know Bugzilla is commonly used. I also looked at Mantis and Trac. I decided to go with Redmine because it’s a Ruby On Rails app.

Installation

The biggest issue was to identify which ports to use. I already had a Puppies application that I was testing as part of my Cucumber and Cheese book. I added a Graylog2 application, also Ruby On Rails for the web interface (server component is java).

I originally chose to use sqlite3 because it was already installed on my system. I knew that I could use IRB to crack into the database if I needed to. Turned out that I did. I had to create an admin user (default one did not work). I eventually switched to MySQL.

Integrations

I integrated it with Git. I had trouble getting it working until I discovered that I needed to point it to the .git directory of my project directory. By including issue id’s in my checking comments, the issue automatically associated the issue with the checkin. The comment showed up on the repository page and the issue page. It supports diffing, too.

I was able to install a Jenkins Plugin (technically it is for Hudson but works on Jenkins) to integrate with my Jenkins. This allowed me to identify which builds the associated checkins would be built. I also installed a Redmine plugin to Jenkins could also track builds on Jenkins to show Redmine issues associated with the build in aggregate.

It also supported multiple projects, and sub-projects. The wiki and news seemed relevant for keeping track of project information.

There is role based access control. That probably isn’t necessary for an agile team so I ignored this capability. Also non-agile (my opinion) is time tracking and Gantt charts.

Conclusion

I found all the features to be useful. If I were going to build my own stack then I would like using this component.

Continous Integration (Jenkins)

I fancy myself an automated tester. What’s so automatic about it if I have to run a command to make the test run? I guess it’s not. So how to I change that? In the past, I have created schedulers and such to kick off tests. Then I made listeners that would figure out if a new build existed.

Those were Mickey Mouse (please Disney, don’t sue me) solutions compared to the ones I started working with for the past four years – integrated continuous build systems, including Cruise Control, Hudson, Jenkins, and Bamboo (my chronological experience). None of those were my doing. Even when my framework was integrated, somebody smarter than me created that solution.

So in favor of not being left in the dark, I felt I should be able to create the same kind of integration. Step 1 is to install a server. I chose Jenkins, not for any particular reason other than I thought that I would be spending more time using it than figuring it out. I think that I was right.

Basic Set Up

At first I started installing the Ubuntu native Jenkins, then I decided it would be easier to download the jenkins.war file. First feature was to get it running. OK, that’s not a feature, but it was important. I hate apps/app servers that use port 8080 so I changed it.

java -jar /devroot/tools/jenkins/jenkins.war --httpPort=5050

I did not have to install any database for it. I will research that more. I added Jenkins GIT plugin to support integration with GIT. That was easy. Then I was able to link my learning project (downloaded Jeff Morgan’s Puppies app) via file link as:

file:///home/dave/dev/puppies/

I set it to poll every minute (hourly doesn’t seem like continuous integration to me).

Advanced Set Up

Finally, I created a command script (what happens when something in the GIT repository changes) with something to do:

cd /home/dave/dev/puppies
rails s &
cucumber --tags @full

To verify, I checked in a change. Here was my ultimate output (I didn’t mind the failures because the cukes are in disarray):

8 scenarios (8 failed)
45 steps (9 failed, 6 skipped, 1 undefined, 29 passed)
2m41.479s

You can implement step definitions for undefined steps with these snippets:

Then /^I should see the following error messages: "(.*?)"$/ do |arg1|
  pending # express the regexp above with the code you wish you had
endBuild step 'Execute shell' marked build as failure
Finished: FAILURE

After I proved to myself that the command scripts ran for check-ins, I added a little bit more. I set up basic authentication for users, allowing everybody to do anything (it’s just me). I also started working on an ssh key, but I didn’t finish that yet.

Summary

Jenkins was easy to install, set up for my repository (even easier for svn and cvs, though I am not sure why), and easy to create mock scripts. I found it easy to integration my test framework. Jenkins even knew that it failed.

I would recommend that any tester that is working on automation should feel comfortable installing and integrating with Jenkins.