path: root/doc/tips/issue_tracking.mdwn

[[meta title="Integrated issue tracking with Ikiwiki"]]

By Joey Hess, LinuxWorld.com

[[template id=note text="""
First published on [LinuxWorld.com](http:://www.linuxworld.com/), a
publication of Network World Inc., 118 Turnpike Rd., Southboro, MA 01772.
"""]]

Wikis are not just for encyclopedias and websites anymore. You can use
Ikiwiki in combination with your revision control system to handle issue
tracking, news feeds, and other needs of a software project. The wiki can
make your bug reports as much a part of your software project as its code,
with interesting results.

Ikiwiki is a wiki engine with a twist.  It's best
described by the term "wiki compiler". Just as a
typical software project consists of source code
that is stored in revision control and compiled with
`make` and `gcc`, an ikiwiki-based wiki is stored as
human editable source in a revision control system,
and built into HTML using ikiwiki.

Ikiwiki uses your revision control system to track
changes and handle tasks such as rolling back changes and
merging edits.  Because it takes advantage of revision
control, there are no annoying warnings about other
people editing a file, or finding yourself locked
out of a file because someone else started editing it
and left.  Instead, the other person's changes will
be automatically merged with yours when you commit.

In the rare cases where automatic merging fails
because of concurrent edits to the same part of a
page, regular commit conflict markers are shown in
the file to let you resolve the conflict, as you
would for conflicting edit in source code.

Ikiwiki is a full-featured wiki that you can use
for a variety of purposes, from traditional wikis
to weblogs, podcasting, or even aggregating other
sites' RSS feeds into a Planet page. While people
are [[using|ikiwikiusers.html]]
Ikiwiki for purposes ranging from genealogy research
to shoe accessory sales, one thing it's especially
well suited for is collaborative software development,
including announcements, documentation, managing a
software project's web site, and even acting as an
issue tracking system.

## Building a project wiki with ikiwiki

The simplest way to use ikiwiki is to build static
HTML files from source wiki files. This example builds
a wiki for an imaginary software project.  The wiki
source files used in this example are available in the
[[examples/softwaresite]] section of ikiwiki's documentation.

	wiki$ ls
	Makefile  bugs.mdwn     doc/      download.mdwn  news/
	bugs/     contact.mdwn  doc.mdwn  index.mdwn     news.mdwn
	wiki$ make
	ikiwiki `pwd` html --wikiname FooBar --plugin=goodstuff \
		--exclude=html --exclude=Makefile
	wiki$ w3m -dump html/doc/faq.html
	FooBar/ doc/ faq
	
	FooBar frequently asked questions.

	1. Is this a real program?
	2. Really?

	_Is this a real program?_

	No, it's just an example.

	_Really?_

	Yes, really.

	Links: contact doc
	Last edited Wed Nov 22 09:58:35 2006

If all you need is a simple static set of pages
that can be put up on a web site, or shipped with
a software package, this is a good starting point.
The examples included with ikiwiki include pages for
a news feed for the project (with RSS), an issue
tracker, and other pages users expect to see on a
project's website. You can check the wiki-format text
into revision control as part of the software project,
and tie it into the build system using the Makefile.

Ikiwiki can also be tied into the `post-commit` hook of your revision
control system, so that whenever a developer commits a change to a wiki
page in revision control, the project's web site is automatically updated.
The [[ikiwiki_tutorial|setup]] explains in
detail how to set this up using the Subversion, Git, TLA, and Mercurial
revision control systems.

The tutorial also explains how to configure ikiwiki so that users can edit
pages using a web interface, with their changes committed back into revision
control. After all, one of the benefits of keeping a project's docs in a wiki
is to make it easy for users to improve them, so that busy software developers
don't have to. And if the wiki is being used for issue tracking, this will
let users post and follow up on bug reports.

## Using a wiki for issue tracking?

You might be wondering exactly how a wiki can be used as an issue tracking
system. Three key parts of ikiwiki come together to create an issue tracker:
pages, tags, and inlining.

Each issue is described on a separate page in the
wiki. There can also be an associated Discussion page,
as well as other related subpages that can be used
to hold files used to reproduce the bug, or patches,
or other related files. Since each issue is a page,
standard wiki links can be used to link related
issues, or link issues with other pages in the wiki.
Each issue has its own unique URL. Since ikiwiki
supports subdirectories, it's usual to keep all the
bugs in a `bugs/` subdirectory. You might prefer
to separate bugs and todo items, with todo items in
their own 'todo/' subdirectory.

While directories are useful for broad hierarchical
grouping, tags are better for categorizing issues
as bugs, wishlist items, security issues, patches,
or whatever other categories are useful. Bugs can
be tagged "moreinfo", "done" "unreproducible",
or "moreinfo", etc, to document different stages of
their lifecycle. A developer can take ownership of a
bug by tagging it with something like "owner/Joey".

To tag a wiki page, edit it and add text such as "\[[tag done]]". Note that
adding a wiki link to "\[[done]]" will have the same categorisation effect
as a tag, but the link will show up in the body of the page, which is a
nice effect if used in a sentence such as "This was \[[done]] in version
1.1.". Another way to close a bug is to move it out of the `bugs/`
subdirectory, though this would prevent it from showing up in a list of
closed bugs.

Inlining is how ikiwiki pulls individual issue pages together into
something larger, be it a page listing recently opened bugs (with a form to
let a user easily post a new bug), or a page listing recently closed bugs,
or an index of all bugs, or all wishlist items, or RSS feeds for any of
these. A flexible syntax is used for specifying what kind of pages should
be inlined into a given page. A few examples:

* A typical list of all open bugs, with their full text, and a form to post new
  bugs.

        \[[inline pages="bugs/* and !link(done) and !*/Discussion" actions=yes postform=yes show=0]]

* Index of the 30 most recently fixed bugs.

        \[[inline pages="bugs/* and link(done) and !*/Discussion" sort=mtime show=30 archive=yes]]

* Index of the 10 most recently active bugs.

        \[[inline pages="bugs/* and !link(done) and !*/Discussion" sort=mtime show=10]]

* Open security issues.

        \[[inline pages="bugs/* and link(security) and !link(done) and !*/Discussion"]]

* Full text of bugs assigned to Joey.

        \[[inline pages="bugs/* and link(owner/Joey) and !link(done) and !*/Discussion" show=0]]

It may seem strange to consider using a wiki for issue tracking when there
are several dedicated bug tracking systems, like Bugzilla, that handle all
aspects of it already. The weakest part of using ikiwiki for issue
tracking, and certainly the place where a dedicated bug tracker like
Bugzilla shines in comparison, is storing and querying structured data
about bugs. Ikiwiki has little structured data except for page filenames
and tags, so if you need lots of queryable data such as what versions a bug
affects and what version it was fixed in, ikiwiki may not be a good fit for
your issue tracking. 

On the other hand, by using a wiki for issue
tracking, there is one less system for users and
developers to learn, and all the flexibility of a
wiki to take advantage of. Ikiwiki even supports
[OpenID](http://openid.net/), so it's easy for users
to use it for filing bugs without going through an
annoying registration process.

Developers who work offline, or at the other end of a
slow connection, might appreciate having a full copy
of the project bug tracking system, too.


## Benefits

Realistically, there are plusses and minuses to letting users edit a
software project's documentation in a wiki. Like any wiki, to be
successful, some review is needed of the changes users make. In some cases
it will be easiest to limit the pages that users are allowed to edit.
Still, keeping the wiki open for user edits will probably turn up some
passionate users who prove very useful at filling in holes in the
documentation and cleaning up the site.

Programmers are supposed to be bad at writing documentation, and putting a
project's docs into a wiki might not solve that. But it can make it a
little bit easier. Consider a programmer who's just coded up a new feature.
He can commit that to a development branch in revision control, and then go
update the docs on the web site to document it. But the feature isn't
available in a released version yet, so it's probably easier to skip
updating the website. Maybe once it's released, the web site will be
updated to mention the feature, but maybe (probably) not.

Now consider what happens if instead the web site is a wiki that has its
source included in the project's revision control system. The programmer
codes up the feature, and can easily update the docs in the wiki to match.
When he commits his changes to a development branch, the docs are committed
too. Later, when that change is merged to the release branch, the doc
changes are also merged, and automatically go live on the web site.
Updating the documentation to reflect each change made and publishing it on
the website has become a standard part of the programmer's workflow.

But this still requires programmers to write documentation, so maybe it
still won't work. Let's go back a step. Before the programmer wrote that
feature, he probably got some requests for it, and maybe he developed those
into a specification for how the feature should work. Since ikiwiki can be
used as an issue tracker, the requests were made using it, and were
collaboratively edited on the wiki, to develop the specification. Once the
feature is implemented, that issue can be closed. What better way to close
it than to move it out of the issue tracking system, and into the project's
documentation?  In Subversion:

	svn mv wiki/bugs/new_feature.mdwn wiki/doc/

If the spec is written well enough to be useful for end user documentation,
the programmer doesn't have to write a lot of docs after all; that was done
when the feature was designed. By using ikiwiki for issue tracking, plus
editing the spec, plus documentation, plus the website, each of these steps
has built on the other and the programmer has had to do less busywork.

A different example of how ikiwiki can tie
things together is how a security hole might be
handled. First it's discovered, and a bug filed about
it. When it's fixed, the commit that fixes the bug
can include a change to the bug's page, marking it
as done. Since it's a security hole, the project
needs to make an announcement right away so users
will know they need to upgrade. This announcement
can be added to the wiki's news feed, and committed
along with the fix, and the announcement can use a
regular wiki link to link to the bug that describes
the security hole in detail. If the security hole
also affects an older version of the software, the
fix, along with the wiki documentation for that fix,
can be merged into the branch for the older version.

Another benefit of keeping the bug tracking system in revision control with
the wiki is that it allows for disconnected development. So there's no need
to be online to review the project's bug list, and there's no need to
remember to close fixed bugs once you're back online.

For fans of distributed revision control, ikiwiki opens even more
possibilities. With a project's website and issue tracker kept in
distributed revision control with the project, these become distributed as
well, rather than centralized appendixes to the project. Developers can
pass around changesets that not only fix bugs, but mark them as done. If
large changes are being made in someone's branch, they can choose to put up
their own version of the website, use it to track bugs for that branch, and
when the branch is ready, all these changes can be merged back into the
mainline of the project.

Ikiwiki powers its own bug tracking system.  To see how wiki bug tracking
works in practice, visit the [[bugs]] or [[TODO]] pages.