The Release Report is a plugin that the Fisheye and Crucible team uses to help their development process. Check out the Release Report as well as many other plugins at plugins.atlassian.com.
Tracking Changes Before A Release
We at Atlassian frequently use feature branches for the ongoing development of Fisheye. Feature branches have proved to be a very practical part of our collaboration process, but it also comes with its own set of headaches – especially when we’re about to release a new version.
In the past, Jira was our source of truth for what changes had made it into a release, but with feature branching, we found that it was easier for fixes to slip to a following release or go in early, meaning the fixVersion in Jira was wrong. A better place to validate the fixes is in your source repository, where we have the commit messages (and you put your Jira keys into your commit messages, right!?!) of the changes that actually made it into the release!
In addition, we wanted to be able to check the quality of the code – make sure that all reviews were closed and if code for a half-fixed Jira was included, make sure it’s not a problem.
So as part of ShipIt 17 we produced the Release Report. It gathers together the list of commits that are new in this release (based on the Commit Graph) including all commits in Feature Branches that were merged to the release branch. From this it gathers all the relevant information you need in one single view:
- Jira issues
- Crucible reviews
- A list of all changes committed from one release to another.
The list of Jira issues includes the state and assignee, as well as the fixVersion, so you can check all the referenced Jiras have the right version set! The list of Crucible reviews shows the state as well as the outstanding reviewers, great for hassling those who are holding you up. And the commit list (for DVCS) includes all the commits that have been merged in since the previous release. At the bottom is some eye candy, a burn up/down chart of your commits, issues and reviews over time.
Getting Started
First thing’s first: download and install the Release Report plugin from the Atlassian Plugin Exchange.
Once the plugin is installed, simply go to the commit graph of one of your DVCS repositories.
From the commit graph, you will be able to choose the Release Report highlight and load the release report for 2 different changesets of your codebase. Follow the steps below:
After clicking on the View Report button, you will be redirected to a page displaying everything that you should know about before your release, all within a single view.
Try Fisheye Today
Are you itching to get started with this feature? Get your free 30-day trial of Fisheye today!
