What value does FishEye bring to a Mercurial repository?

Leon Berger June 19, 2012

We're currently evaluating Jira, Greenhopper, Fisheye and Cruicible for our company and so far I have yet to see the value of Fisheye. AFICT, it basically mimics everything Mercurial already does. Please correct me if I'm wrong here, but from what I've seen, so far, there is no real linkage to Issues - UNLESS - the committer happens to mention the Issue ID in his/her commit comment.

If that is indeed the case, then isn't there a cheeper way to have Jira interact with Mercurial directly?

Sorry for sounding negative, but we're on a tight budget and need to justify every penny we spend...:-(

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Sten Pittet
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June 20, 2012

Hi Leon,

When you are saying that FishEye does everything Mercurial does do you mean things that you can through the command line?

If you are using Mercurial solely through your terminal then FishEye will save you time by offering a simpler and faster way to browse the history of your code. It will provide a better way to view the blame and identify quickly the author of a faulty line. It will allow you to have a better understanding of your code with the Commit Graph.

Then from an integration perspective FishEye is the tool that allows your commits to appear in JIRA under a source tab. You were right saying that it was through the commit messages that the linkage of issues is done. But that feature is part of FishEye as you need to offer a way to see the commit in its original context when you look at a particular issue.

You can also leverage the Smart Commits to automatically transition issues and create reviews from your commit messages.

Let me know if this is answering your question about the value of FishEye.

Cheers,

Sten Pittet
Dev Tools Product Manager

Leon Berger June 20, 2012

Hi Sten,

Thanks for your reply. We're using Turtoise Workbench to work in our Mercurial repository. So all the commit graphs and difs etc. we can see through it as well.

Now, while I agree with you that Smart Commits are pretty cool and do add value to FishEye, I still wonder if it justifies the price. The fact that issues are only linked by comments makes it very easy to allow for code to slip between the cracks. For example, if a developer or QA tech fat-fingers the issue ID.

It would be much better if there was a dropdown associated with the commit comment box that shows the developer/QA all the issues they're assigned to and make them choose one. This way, even if they choose a wrong one by accident the code doesn't get lost in the heystack.

Is there any other (cheeper) way to connect to a Mercurial repository in Jira?

Thanks,

Leon Berger.

Sten Pittet
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June 21, 2012

The JIRA FishEye pluging is the only way provided by Atlassian for your Hg source to appear in JIRA. However, looking on the marketplace I found a plugin that you might be interested in:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.consultingtoolsmiths.jira.plugin.ext.mercurial.mercurial-jira-plugin

I haven't tried it myself but it might be a solution for you. Let me know what you think of it.

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