One Bug, Multiple Branches

I enjoyed presenting and discussing some new ideas about how to use JIRA to track bugs in different branches along with their associated builds. This was all at the April San Francisco Atlassian User Group last night, kindly hosted by Atlassian.

My idea is to create a new issue type named "Build" and then create a new build issue for every build. Ordinary bugs in JIRA can then have regular JIRA links named "Present in Build" and "Absent from Build" connecting them to the specific builds in which they are found or fixed. The interesting part is that if you link the Build issues to other Build issues, you get a tree of related builds such as the diagram above that you can then use to deduce which bugs are present in any given release, and also which releases a given bug is likely to be in. Useful information that is rarely available in current issue trackers.

My presentation is available via Google Docs. Feedback welcome, as are beta testers for the ideas in JIRA.

Verification code for Empire Avenue: EAVB_KMCAYMVSLW

Software Engineering and Academia

Bertrand Meyer has an excellent article about why academic computer science has a smaller impact than other academic disciplines do in their respective fields. As he puts it, "academic research has had its part, honorable but limited."

"Researchers in experimental physics or mechanical engineering employ technicians: often highly qualified personnel who help researchers set up the experiments and process results. In software engineering the equivalent would be programmers, software engineers, testers, technical writers; in the environments that I have seen, getting financing for such positions from a research agency is impossible."

"The only software we can produce, if we limit ourselves to official guidelines, is demo software. ... many of us work around the restrictions ... by spending considerable time away from research on programming and maintenance tasks that would be far more effectively handled by specialized personnel. The question indeed is efficiency."

For me, that's what a software toolsmith does.

How to change your OSX terminal color for ssh sessions

Sometimes I have lots of terminal windows open for ssh sessions to multiple machines. It can all be a bit confusing even if I use the remote machine name in the shell prompt. So I got terminal colorization working for me with help from here and here.
There is a default color for all screens that are using ssh and you can also customize the colors for different remote machines. When you end the ssh session, the terminal returns to black on white.

This is for OS X because it uses the osascript command to change the colors but the rest of the shell script should be just fine for Unix.

$ cat /usr/local/bin/ssh
#!/bin/sh

# Color the OSX Terminal app according the hostname used in ssh
# Assumes you log in with a simple "ssh myuserid@remotehost"
# Place in a directory such as /usr/local/bin that is before the real ssh location

# The value of whatever was after the @ in the command
HOSTNAME=`echo $@ | sed s/.*@//`

set_bg () {
  osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to set background color of window 1 to $1"
}

set_text () {
  osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to set normal text color of window 1 to $1"
}

# Return to black text on white background
on_exit () {
    # echo exited
  set_bg "{65535,65535,65535}"
  set_text "{0, 0, 0}"
}
trap on_exit EXIT

# My color names
#  green   10000,40000,40000 
#  blue    10000,20000,60000 
#  orange  60000,40000,00000 
#  red     60000,00000,00000 
#  yellow  60000,60000,40000 

case $HOSTNAME in
  fisheye) set_bg "{60000,60000,40000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
  jira|jira2) set_bg "{10000,40000,40000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
# unused colors follow
#   blue) set_bg "{10000,20000,60000}" ; set_text  "{65535,65535,65535}" ;;
#  orange) set_bg "{60000,40000,00000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
#  red) set_bg "{60000,00000,00000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
#  yellow) set_bg "{60000,60000,40000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
#  gray) set_bg "{60000,57000,55000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
  *) set_bg "{60000,57000,55000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
esac

/usr/bin/ssh "$@"