wiki:AnalyzePlugin

Version 18 (modified by Rob Guttman, 12 years ago) (diff)

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Analyzes tickets for dependency and other problems

Notice: This plugin is unmaintained and available for adoption.

Description

This is an extensible analysis tool for analyzing tickets in reports. This plugin requires JavaScript and includes a version of jquery-ui for the dialog modals. This plugin currently has three built-in analyses:

  1. Milestone Dependency Analysis - ensures dependent tickets are in current or prior milestones
  2. Queue Dependency Analysis - ensures dependent tickets in a queue are ordered correctly
  3. Project Dependency Analysis - ensures dependent child tickets in a queue are ordered correctly

These analyses all build off of the master tickets plugin. The second and third also build off of the queues plugin. See below for examples.

Configuration

  1. Install the plugin (after downloading and unzipping):
    cd analyzeplugin/0.12
    sudo python setup.py bdist_egg
    sudo cp dist/TracAnalyze*.egg /your/trac/location/plugins/
    

See TracPlugins for more installation details and options. You'll likely need to restart Trac's web server after installation.

  1. Enable the plugin:
    [components]
    analyze.* = enabled
    

You can alternatively use the Trac Web Admin GUI to enable any or all rules.

  1. Enable the ANALYZE_VIEW permission for those users who are allowed to execute analyses.

See the examples section below for how to specify rules.

Bugs/Feature Requests

Existing bugs and feature requests for AnalyzePlugin are here.

If you have any issues, create a new ticket.

Download

Download the zipped source from [download:analyzeplugin here].

Source

You can check out AnalyzePlugin from here using Subversion, or browse the source with Trac.

Example

This plugin currently includes three analyses that can each be individually enabled for one or more reports. Each analysis is configured by modifying the [analyze] section of trac.ini - see below for examples. When an analysis is enabled for a report, an Analyze... button appears at the top of the report and the analysis' name will appear in the subsequent dialog box when the button is clicked. You can either choose a single analysis or all analyses in this dialog box. Selecting "All" will run them serially.

Important: The current analyses are powerful and yet are limited. They do not, for example, detect circular dependencies nor can they handle complex relationships all in one pass. What this means is that after a pass of fixes, the changes may have caused or exposed other issues that another analysis pass will uncover. So the general usage pattern is to continue re-running analyses until "quiescence" is reached - i.e., until there are no more issues to fix.

Milestone Dependency Analysis

The popular master tickets plugin enables specifying dependencies amongst tickets and visualizes them via graphviz. However, the plugin doesn't include support to manage these dependencies such as detecting when tickets are scheduled out of order. That's where this Milestone Dependency Analysis comes in.

This analysis detects when a ticket in a given report has a dependency (a blockedby ticket) that is in a future milestone (or not scheduled in any milestone). This works with either of the following semantics for blockedby tickets:

  • blockedby tickets are peer ordering relationships
  • blockedby tickets are project (aka parent-child) relationships - where the parent/project's milestone is the latest milestone for the work to be completed

To enable this analysis for a given report, list those reports in trac.ini as follows:

[analyze]
milestone_reports = 1,9

Detected problems are shown with an option to automatically fix the problem by moving tickets into appropriate milestones - see screenshot above.

Queue Dependency Analysis

The queues plugin converts one or more reports into work queues. These queues enable you to drag and drop tickets above and below one another signifying their relative priority. Each ticket's relative position is maintained in a custom field usually named position (but can be named anything). Dependencies amongst peer tickets in a work queue have similar problems as tickets across milestones - in this case, a dependent ticket should precede (i.e., appear higher in the queue which means have a lower position value), but it can be difficult to manually catch all of these dependency violations. That's where this Queue Dependency Analysis comes in.

This analysis detects when a ticket in a given report has a dependency (a blockedby ticket) whose position comes after this ticket's (or has no position yet at all). To enable this analysis for a given report, list those reports in trac.ini as follows:

[analyze]
queue_reports = 2,9
queue_fields = queue,milestone

The queue_fields (optional) above tells this analysis what fields define a queue (if any). Queues can be defined by zero or more fields such as the milestone field, a custom queue field, both or other fields. If you have different reports using different definitions, you can define report-specific queue field definitions as follows:

[analyze]
queue_fields.9 = queue

In this example, report 2 uses both queue and milestone fields to define a queue whereas report 9 uses only the queue field.

Detected problems are shown with an option to automatically fix the problem by moving tickets above or below each other in the queue - see screenshot above.

Project Dependency Analysis

This analysis is for project queues (instead of work queues) meaning that the dependency semantics is parent-child. For example, you may have a report of project (or "epic" in agile-speak) tickets whose sub-tasks are represented in their blockedby dependencies. Re-prioritizing a project/epic/parent ticket does not automatically re-order their child tickets, respectively. That's where this Project Dependency Analysis comes in.

This analysis will enforce that the child tickets (usually found in a separate work queue report) are ordered relative to one another in the same general order as the parent/project tickets. To enable this analysis for a given report, list those reports in trac.ini as follows:

[analyze]
project_reports = 19
project_type = epic

The project_type option above is the name that you call your projects (e.g., "epic" (the default), "project", etc.). These tickets do not have to be of any specific ticket type - at least not at this time.

Detected problems are shown with an option to automatically fix the problem by moving the sub-task/child tickets above or below each other in their queue (to match their parent's relative positions) - see screenshot above.

Tips!

A few ideas to optimize your analysis experience:

  • If this tool's project management changes generates emails that are of little value to your team, then you can quiet them by enabling "Quiet Mode" using the Quiet Plugin.
  • Use TicketQuery in a project/epic's description to see all of its sub-tasks/children. Here's an example that allows you to order by position as the first column and the ticket id as the second. The 1234 is the project/epic's ticket number:
    [[TicketQuery(blocking~=1234,format=table,col=position|id|summary|severity|owner|effort|milestone|phase,order=position,group=type)]]
    
  • The core analyses are maintained in python modules that require no imports. This was intentional so that they may be easily wrapped and called from a monitoring script (e.g., nagaconda for nagios) so that you can be proactively alerted to ticket scheduling issues without needing to manually run analyses in Trac.

Extensibility (implementation details)

Each analysis is implemented as a Trac extension point to allow for new analyses to be added fairly easily. See analysis.py for the IAnalysis interface. In brief, you only need to define two methods for each analysis:

  • can_analyze(self, report) - returns True if this analysis can analyze the given report
  • get_solutions(self, db, args) - return a dict of name and data fields, or a list of these that define how to fix the detected issue.

where args are the request args and data is any serializable (to JSON) python object that contains all of the data needed to automatically fix the problem. If this data object is a dict of ticket fields and their new values (or a list of these), then the default fix_issue() method will automatically apply the fix upon user command. If your fix is more involved, you can override this method:

  • fix_issue(self, db, data, author) - fix the issue using the data that was returned earlier from get_solutions().

See the code for examples and other smaller tweaks to the IAnalysis interface and base Analysis class.

Recent Changes

13995 by rjollos on 2014-06-25 00:51:48
Added copyright year. Refs #11832.
13993 by rjollos on 2014-06-22 10:10:17
Fixed URL in setup.py.
13992 by rjollos on 2014-06-22 10:08:03
Changed to 3-Clause BSD license with permission of author. Refs #11832.
(more)

Author/Contributors

Author: robguttman
Maintainer: robguttman
Contributors:

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