Integrating our bug tracking system with CVS...

Well...

We've had a SOAP interface built into our bug tracking software (FBT) for some time, but we've had very little time to play with it ourselves... I had been intending to use it to (among other things), integrate our CVS source code repository with our bug tracking system...

I spent the past week creating a perl command line tool that uses the soap interface of FBT to:
1) Get the details of a single bug
2) Get an overview of a list of bugs (based on various criteria)
3) Create a new bug
4) Update an existing bug (This is what we use when integrating with CVS) ...
[These operations map to the 4 primary operations of our soap interface, which in turn map to the 4 basic CRU(not D, but another type of higher level Read) operations that you reguarly perform in FBT...]

Creating the perl command line tool, and working with SOAP::Lite a perl library for soap calls, has been really enjoyable... The tool can take tons of command line arguments for all of the various fields within the system... I've started playing around as just a handy was to read the details about an issue from the command line without needing to use a browser to connect to our system ("fbtcmd.pl getId 123") ...

We wrote another small perl script that takes some details from CVS looks for "bug XYZ", and then calls the fbtcmd tool, and sends a link to our cvsweb web interface to CVS that can display the differences that were checked in... fbtcmd also automatically marks the bug(s) "Ready for Retest" (this is configurable) and assigns them back to the creator (and activates the various notification within FBT to notify the creator, etc...)

We'll be using the tool internally for the next couple of weeks, and will be releasing it to our customers once we're happy with how it's working... This integration will greatly speed up the code reviews that we perform on each other's code as it gets commited...