JIRA Plastic SCM Extension

Description/Features

The result of Plastic SCM integration with JIRA highly improves your company´s return on investment by increasing the reliability, quality and agility of both your distributed and parallel software development.

Plastic SCM for Atlassian JIRA provides reliable data mapping features that allow data type transformation between both tools; this highly improves your development´s traceability.

Companies can use JIRA to quickly improve the power of Plastic´s change management features; with this integration you will be able to leverage your investment in JIRA to increase agility and improve team collaboration.

Organizations using Plastic SCM with JIRA will be achieving shorter development cycles and improved efficiency at a lower cost throughout the application lifecycle.

This integration also favors adopting best practices; you can easily model and roll out new processes that help your team work more efficiently.

By working with both tools you will get the best out of two sides of the same coin and your process will be highly improved. On this integration, when checking in your changes on a branch, this is associated to a JIRA issue: every check in operation done on the branch associated to a certain issue is registered.  And not just the operation itself, but also the date, time, content, comments and checkin author!. This provides a total management of your version control from JIRA!

Installation

Server Installation:

A user with Administration permit on JIRA must create a new 'CustomField' in the system. You must click on the 'CustomField' link on the administration tab.

Click on "Add Custom Field"."Read-only text field" must be selected as type. This option cannot be edited manually. The log for check in operations done through JIRA extension for Plastic SCM must be introduced.

Now a name must be given to this field, as well as to its set up options. You can leave the options by default, which means that this check in log will be used for every project and every type of issue. But is needed, these options can be modified.

On the option of choosing a screen for this field you must select "Default Screen". You can see that and internal id has been assigned to this CustomField.This id must be written down as it must be specified on the client extension configuration.
Once this step is completed our CustomField is created.
 This newly created field will not appear until a check in operation has been done, so a client must be set up in order to use this extension and he must check in on the branch associated to that issue. This field will be then shown.
The following step through the process will be activating calls to RPC's on the server, as this is how the extension communicates with the server.
 Go to "General Configuration" in Global Settings and check if the 'Accept remote API calls' is active.
Once these steps have been fulfilled, JIRA server is ready to accept Plastic SCM integration.

Client InstallationIn the first place it is necessary to copy 'jiraextension.dll' to the folder where Plastic SCM client is installed.

You must add the following lines (circled in red) to the file 'client.conf' in order to indicate the client to use this extension.

Creating a 'jiraextension.conf' is also needed in order to specify the extension of the parameters that will interact with the Server.

The meaning of each of the parameters is the following one:

• HttpUrl: JIRA IP address and port.
•  User: JIRA user to be logged in the system for queries and check in logs.
• Password: Password corresponding to the specific user.
• ProjectKey: Key of the project whose issues will be related to Plastic SCM branches.
• BranchPrefix: Prefix that will contain branches created in Plastic SCM to be associated with a JIRA issue.
• CustomFieldId: Id of the previously created filed to be used for logging check ins done with Plastic SCM. Once all the parameters have been configured, Plastic SCM can begin to use JIRA extensión in a fully transparent way to the user.

Usage

Examples

Additional options on branch view:

Through the branch view, once the extension has been set up, y ou will see that a new column appears on branch view, showing the description of the task associated to that branch, which on this case corresponds to "Summary" field of the issue created on JIRA. If you click on the branch you will see information associated to the corresponding issue. Additionally, if you right click on a branch you can see the 'Associated task info...' option.
If you click on it, an Explorer window with the associated bug is opened.
Check in operations register:Apart from showing information on the issues associated to the branches integrated with Plastic SCM, this extension logs in JIRA every check in done on the branches with associated issues. So, after working on the branch associated to 'PRJ-1' issue, if you have a look at the issue you can see how every check in operation has been registered on the branch associated to that issue.For every check in you can see the following information: its repository, the changeset associated to the operation, Plastic SCM user and the time (client´s) on which it was done, the comment associated to that check in and the involved items.
This view can be a lot bigger, depending on the work done on each branch, so this field can be hidden and the user will be able to see the rest of the issue fields.
Version History

Open Issues

Screenshots