Ship of Safety

"I sailed my ship of safety 'til I sank it."
  -- Closer to Fine, Indigo Girls

Our team recently moved our source control to Subversion, away from a certain wildly popular product which is known neither for being very visual nor for keeping our source very safe. We named our Subversion repository "1" (as in svn://svn/1), so we refer to it affectionately by the portmanteau "Sub-Version-One". I mention this because we think it's terribly clever.

We have found our new source control system quite agreeable. Our remote developers have seamless access now. Although we briefly missed Visual Studio integration, it was only a few days before we all became comfortable interacting with source control outside the IDE. Using TortoiseSVN (tor-twah, as I like to say) shell extension makes interacting with the Subversion repository quite easy and effective, right in Windows Explorer. Throw in the excellent Beyond Compare from Scooter Software and you've got a great source control experience.

But the really cool part is that it integrates with our VersionOne system. Here's how it works:

Whenever we check in code, we mention in the comment the ID of whatever Story, Defect, Task or Test we were working on. Behind the scenes, there is a service watching Subversion check-ins for text that looks like a VersionOne ID. When it sees one, it uses the VersionOne API to create a corresponding ChangeSet asset in VersionOne, and associates that ChangeSet with the correct Story. This information is then viewable within VersionOne.

For example, here's a story that Patrick and Donald have been working on:

We can see the whole sequence of check-ins associated with this story. Each check-in comment is captured in the ChangeSet Description field, along with other useful information in other fields.

If we want deeper information about a certain check-in, then we can click on, for example, the link "ChangeSet:1641".

This link has been custom-configured to send us straight to our Subversion repository browser (which we custom-styled similarly to the VersionOne). It even shows up on a new tab in the same window with the Story.

How did we set all this up? We used the same integration services that are freely available to all VersionOne users, particularly V1Svn. What's more, full source code is free for downloading! So you can easily set up your own VersionOne/Subversion integration for your team (even if your VersionOne system is hosted, no less).

I only mention all this because we think it's terribly clever.

Comments

[Henning]

Dood - there IS Visual Studio integration available!

http://www.visualsvn.com ($49 for each developer)

http://ankhsvn.tigris.org (Open Source, but not quite as feature rich).