Ravenbrook / Projects / Perforce Defect Tracking Integration / Version 2.1 Product Sources / Design

Perforce Defect Tracking Integration Project


Workflow enforcement design

Gareth Rees, Ravenbrook Limited, 2000-10-27

1. Introduction

This document describes how the Perforce Defect Tracking Integration enforces the defect tracker's workflow in the Perforce interface.

The readership of this document is anyone developing or maintaining the P4DTI software.

This document is not confidential.

2. Design notes

What we have done for the replication is the reverse of pushing p4's weak security into the defect tracker. We are instead pushing the defect tracker's security into Perforce.

Here's how this worked in the TeamTrack integration. The P4DTI no longer supports integration with TeamTrack, but this description is retained for reference purposes:

When a Perforce user changes a job in Perforce, the replicator tries to find a transition in TeamTrack that corresponds to that change, and attempts to apply that transition on behalf of the user who made the change. TeamTrack applies its rules and may reject the change, or the replicator may fail to find a valid transition and reject the change itself.

What happens when the change is rejected is configurable and depends on an organization's policy, but two options that we expect to be popular are:

This approach should generalize to any defect tracker that enforces rules about who can do what to defect records.

So the integration allows organizations to enforce workflow rules in Perforce. It may look like the workflow rules can be got around in Perforce, but the replicator spots illegal changes to jobs and makes sure that they are dealt with.

One thing the integration isn't able to control is who is able to look at job descriptions. A defect tracker may have rules about who can see which fields or which jobs, but in Perforce if you can see one you can see them all. Is this kind of security important to you as well? This can only really be met by separating out the defects into jobs on different Perforce servers.

A. References

[GDR 2000-10-27] "Re: Paul Goffin: RE: [p4] Bugzilla integration" (e-mail message); Gareth Rees; Ravenbrook Limited; 2000-10-27.

B. Document History

2000-11-20 RB Created based on [GDR 2000-10-27].
2001-03-02 RB Transferred copyright to Perforce under their license.
2003-06-02 NB Noted that TeamTrack integration is no longer supported.

This document is copyright © 2001 Perforce Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Ravenbrook / Projects / Perforce Defect Tracking Integration / Version 2.1 Product Sources / Design