Software Development Environment
A Working Group has been formed with the remit of looking towards common requirements for software development and with the aim of providing a standard toolset to support software development in the University.
The aim is to support the requirements of all University developers, particularly .NET / Java / PHP but also where appropriate to be agnostic and support C, C++, Python, Ruby, Visual Basic etc.
The priority areas which have been considered are the provision of a source code repository service and the provision of a software defect tracking system.
If you have particular suggestions for tools or systems which could be considered by the group please contact David Cupit (Web Services Applications Manager) in the first instance.
Source code repository
There have been a variety of repositories and version control systems used in the University and the working group decided that Subversion provided the best solution for University developers. It has already been used within IT services by the Infrastructure Applications team and is being actively supported and maintained in the open-source development community.
The Subversion service should be available from November 2008 and for details of how to get access to this or to discuss any particular requirements, contact Pete Birkenshaw in the Infrastructure Applications team.
Once this service is up and running, support for the existing CVS central service will be phased out.
Software Defect Tracking System
Software defect tracking was thought to an area where a standardised approach would benefit the development community.
We evaluated and selected a commercial product, Jira from Atlassian which is part of a suite of development tools from this supplier and has been widely used within the open-source development community and supports a wide range of IDEs and source code repositories.
Jira offers comprehensive software defect tracking capabilities including the capability to classify issues as Bug, Improvement, Feature or Task. It enables you to say which versions of the software are affected by an issue and in which version it was resolved. Cross referencing of issues is also a useful feature.
If you wish to have access to the Jira system, please contact Anthony Colebourne in the Web Services Applications Team.
The service is available at the following url:
http://issues.itservices.manchester.ac.uk
For the details of the information we require to set up a project in Jira see:
http://wiki.manchester.ac.uk/portal/index.php/Category:JIRA
which gives full details and explains the groups, permissions and roles.
You will need to let us know which users you want in which group. The system uses standard University ldap usernames.
You will need to specify your project names and project leads. New projects will be set up for you and you can have as many as you want. (Note: Projects can have components, so some small things can be components of a project rather than projects of their own).
Additional information:
- Projects can have a url
- Projects can have a description
- Projects have a KEY
(This is the unique project key. It specifies the first letters of issue keys in this project. Issue keys are used in urls and cvs commit messages.)
Feel free to suggest something memorable to you, e.g. Fedora might have the key 'FED'