[yt-dev] Issue tracking with JIRA?

[Matthew Turk]

Hi Nathan,

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 12:02 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The recent bitbucket update called my attention to JIRA, another Atlassian
> product.  If you've never heard of it, this video gives a good summary of
> what it does:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTvEudE4WWA
>
> JIRA is integrated with bitbucket so it should be straightforward to connect
> it with our repositories and issue tracking system. Seeing as how we're
> going to transition to yt-3.0, which hopefully means that a lot will be
> getting done, this will hopefully help keep us organized and track progress.
>
> We should qualify for a free open source license:
> http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request
>
> Thoughts?

The issue tracker on BitBucket has a number of downsides to it.  I
would be interested in exploring alternatives.  In particular, the
issue tracker as it stands does a much better job of tracking bugs
than it does handle tracking enhancements.  I think our community is
growing very rapidly, and I think it would be very valuable to have a
public roadmap that is more codified than just a bunch of emails.
Plus, JIRA allows for ties into things like the commits in a much more
flexible way than the issue tracker does -- including Bamboo, which is
Atlassian's testing system.  In fact, Bamboo would work quite nicely
with unit testing, and would offload much of the work of testing new
branches and PRs.

But, this would require a lot of buy-in on the part of the big
contributors -- as well as on the part of smaller contributors.  I see
it as being a possible venue for either tracking everything (which
might cause problems since we're finally getting bugs reported) or
just tracking enhancements to the code base and longer term things.
For instance, we could still include bugs in the Issue Tracker but
then move things like "fast neighbor query for particles" to JIRA.

One problem that I think we should be wary of is that participation
from individual contributors can vary considerably, and adding new
systems on top of the existing ones can reduce eagerness.  While I
would love to have a proper project roadmap the developers participate
in, I am not sure this is feasible or desirable for others -- but it
is worth exploring.  I'd encourage everybody to watch the video, think
about how we could potentially catalyze development and encourage
participation, longer-range planning, and coordinated efforts.  I'd
like to hear from others about what they think of the JIRA idea.  (As
well as any other projects like Bamboo, actually.)

-Matt

>
> -Nathan
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