If I had to pick a single thing that really bothers me of Jira OnDemand is that it doesn’t support our hosted svn in any possible way.
The biggest pain developers like me have without any basic integration between the VCS and the ticketing system is that any time you have to test an issue, perform some code reviews, sort out some merging or simply digging the history of a given piece of code, it wastes your time to switch between all of your unconnected tools to accomplish your task. As an example, at Backbase we use Trac to look at our code on a browser, and we end up having to type URLs by hand to switch on and off Jira.
How hard could it be to simply link Jira to our commits?
Looking at a way to fix this issue, I first had an intuition: what our Jira does support are web links to an issue. Trac is just another web site, why can’t we use application links instead of listing the commit messages as Jira comments? After all, there’s a rich API that I can use to script the hell out of our commits! It literally took me 40 minutes to come up with the following:
It currently features:
That’s it. Not an impressive list of features, but enough for 40m hacking on bash scripts. When we’ll have this hook installed in our svn server, we can easily go from the Jira issue to all the diffs associated with it.
This facilitates code reviews and issue verification or analysis at a later stage, enormously simplifying the life of every developer by providing that dead-simple integration that Atlassian doesn’t want to provide out of the box.
I understand the performance reasons behind avoid fully integrating on-premise svn with OnDemand instances. Still, they could do much, much better than say they’re sorry and live their customers lives being miserable because of it.