CODEWITHSUNDEEP
tfsjirajira-plugin
maz
maz

Reputation: 523

Integrate crucible with tfs

I use TFS with Jira to managment my team tasks. I want to integrate a Code Review tool at development process.

When i try to use crucible i reveal that it not support TFS.

I want to know if , there is a good and credible solution for this ,to enable me use crucible with TFS.

additional , if there are another suggests for code reiview tool for VS and JIRA.

Thank!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3668

Answers (2)

Alezis
Alezis

Reputation: 2759

Some time ago we decided to run Crucible on our project. Our project uses TFS 2012. We use one branch in TFS called 'dev' as a trunk, i.e. branch where developers make commits and where raw code located. Second branch where release code located called 'main' Our workflow for peer review was:

  1. Make some changes and shelve code
  2. Send email to reviewer
  3. Reviewer doing review in some custom tool and send email with notification that he is done
  4. Commit code into 'dev' branch on TFS
  5. Wait while build-server makes successful build
  6. Commit to 'main' branch where production code resides

Our goal was to improve step 2 and 3. Crucible is great tool, but it doesn't support TFS out of the box, thus we decided to use some TFS bridge. Actually, there are two main options either using tfs->svn or tfs->git. Finally, we decided to use tfs->git bridge, because creating branches in git extremely cheap and it might have been helpful (it did), because we was thinking use branches in git for out shelvesets in TFS. Finally we made our mind to use git. So far I know only 2 options to convert TFS into git:

  • git tf - this one works on Linux and recommended by Microsoft
  • git tfs - this one works only under Windows, but we choose this one, because of large set of commands We need to convert TFS branch into Git repo and maintain our git repository in fresh state. We don't work with git to push new changes back into TFS, we need git repo only for Crucible.

There are steps we made to achieve the goal: 1. Firstly, we cloned our TFS "dev" branch into "dev" repo. We needed only this one branch, and we haven't any back merges from "main" branch. We have tried to do this with clone command, but without any luck:

git tfs clone http://tfs:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection $/SOME_PATH/dev

This command cloning full history from TFS, but it seems our TFS branch quite large and at some time git-tfs crashed with System.OutOfMemoryException exception. Another time, we failed with exception that max limit of path was exceeded, we found workaround by mapping workspace dir into as short path as possible as follows:

git config --global git-tfs.workspace-dir e:\ws

When we failed with clone command, we went to use quick-clone command. This one cloning starting from any time in history, from any changeset. 

git tfs quick-clone -c545532 http://tfs:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection $/SOME_PATH/dev

Option -c545532 here is the number of changeset to starting copying from. Once per year we update all our source files with new header, thus we just to copy from beginning of current year. In that way we should have all necessary history to make branches from shelvesets. If you hadn't used -c argument here, you would have haven't any history at all, because quick-clone copies just history if you asking for it. Once repository was cloned, we had written "script" and put it into task scheduler to run every 5 min. What script is doing is just checking for new commits in TFS and creates new branches on our git repository. Again, we use git-tfs here. To get all new commits we call pull command:

git tfs pull

To unshelve TFS shelveset into particular git branch we use unshelve command:

git tfs unshelve -user=TFSDOMAIN\Username "Shelveset Name Here" Branch_Shelveset_Name_Here

This last command creates branch 'Branch_Shelveset_Name_Here' in git from shelveset 'Shelveset Name Here' in TFS. A shelveset's name can contains spaces and some escape chars, so our "script" clean up such cases. As I said, creating branches very cheap on git, thus we haven't any problems with this. If something was pushed into git repo we call crucible API to refresh it. BTW: To make git repo visible in network I just installed SCM-Server. Crucible was installed and configured to use our domain username/password, thus we get email notification as well. As result we drastically improved step 2 and 3 from our workflow and it works for few months and we are happy with it.

Our workflow became:

  1. Make some changes and shelve code
  2. Wait for our shelveset in crucible (about 6-8 min), create review
  3. Reviewer doing review in crucible
  4. Commit code into 'dev' branch on TFS
  5. Wait while build-server makes successful build
  6. Commit to 'main' branch where production code resides

While working with this I noticed few issues:

Issue1: If you added new file into project and shelved it, you would not see it in git repo, because git-tfs can't find parent commit for it. I'm not sure is it bug of this tool or not, but simplest workaround for this, is having at least one file in shelveset with existing parent. For example, you have added 2 new files and want to send it for review. Instead of creating shelveset with these files, just touch any file which already in git repo (make it pending in Visual Studio), finally you will be able create shelveset with three files (2 new files [add] and 1 for edit [edit]). In that case everything works and git-tfs can unshelve TFS' shelveset into git branch., i.e. we can see it in crucible.

Issue2: One day our HEAD in git repo became detached from "master" branch. Once that happened crucible didn't see new changesets. I have fixed it with command:

git rebase HEAD master

I have created picture how this everything works on our project, may be it could be helpful:

TFS-GIT-CRUCIBLE

Upvotes: 9

MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood
MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood

Reputation: 23434

You can integrate Mira and TFS with TaskTop and then use the code review tools built into Visual Studio.

These I think are your best options.

Upvotes: 2

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