Useful "FishEye for Jira" plugin

Jira is easy to integrate with CVS and Subversion, but there's a FishEye for Jira plugin that can give you even better integration. If you are using FishEye (think ViewVC on steroids, plus change logs) as a front-end to your CVS or Subversion repositories, you should definitely investigate this plugin.

The screenshot below shows how the plugin replaces the Commit tab in Jira with a new FishEye tab.


Why is this a better approach?

The default mechanism used by Jira to connect issues to commits is by looking for issue identifiers in commit messages. For example, a commit with the message "Fixing TST-1234 again" is probably referring to the issue TST-1234. So far, so good.

The problem is that getting this information from CVS and tracking ongoing changes involves running "cvs log" and parsing the output. I recently came across one such file that was 90MB and took 10 minutes of churn to produce. Since the commit is only connected to the issue when this file is reparsed, there is often a sizable delay between making a commit and seeing it appear for the issue in Jira. Subversion integration with Jira is less of a load on the Subversion server, but still suffers from the same delay.

The FishEye plugin is much smarter than that. It uses the FishEye API to remotely query your FishEye instance each time that you refresh the FishEye tab of an issue inside Jira. FishEye has already indexed all the commits for its own purposes, so it can provide up-to-date results far faster than the out-of-the-box approach. Another benefit is that Jira no longer needs to load down the CVS server, or even contact the Subversion server.

Nitty Gritty

Installation is just like any other plugin, with some configuration in a .properties file. Remember to enable the API access in FishEye, and use the same names for repositories in the configuration file that you used when defining them in FishEye.