1. Software Management Systems Support for mbone videoconferencing for the research community - SUMOVER Socrates Varakliotis Piers O’Hanlon{kirstein, piers, socrates}@cs.ucl.ac.uk Peter Kirstein UCL Computer Science 28-30 November 2005

2. 2 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL What are they? Configuration management/control (CMS) –management and control of features and changes of an automated information system, throughout its development and operational life Source code or s/w configuration management (SCM) –a methodology to control and manage a software development project "set of activities designed to control change by identifying the work products that are likely to change, establishing relationships among them, defining mechanisms for managing different versions of these work products, controlling the changes imposed, and auditing and reporting on the changes made.“ R. Pressman, ‘Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach’

3. 3 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Outline Part A: Revision management systems Part B: Bug/feature tracking systems Part C: Static analysis tools Part D: Testing tools

4. 4 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Part A Revision management systems

5. 5 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Revision management Aka revision control (RCS) or version control a)Distributed: b)Non-distributed c)Other History 1970’s: Unix make, diff, SCCS 1980’s: RCS, patch 1985’s: CVS 2000’s: Arch, BitKeeper

6. 6 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Git Directory content manager (git is a filesystem, not SCM!) –A tree history storage system, ‘plumbing’ not ‘porcelain’ Designed to handle very large and complex projects (Linux kernel tree > 2.6.12 and others) Every working directory is a full repository Design principle: speed & efficiency for project manager and developers Not using centralised server

7. 7 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Git: Cogito Set of scripts that build a SCM around git and simplify its usage A couple of web-based front ends developed

8. 8 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL CVS Client-server architecture, originally built on top of RCS Very popular with open source community Compare files, request complete history of changes, check out historical snapshot, anonymous read access, branching Currently used for UCL mbone tools (VRVS?)

9. 9 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL CVS (2) Uses delta compression Various web-based front ends, like ViewCVS Limitations: –Cannot rename files –Cannot delete modules (directories) –Limited support for UNICODE files

10. 10 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Subversion: svn Modern ‘replacement’ for CVS Can run as standalone server (svnserve) or via Apache (svn uses URLs to identify versioned resources) => http logging available If Apache is used then the most recent repository browsing is available Svn supported by ViewCVS (adds history browsing, coloured diffs, syntax colouring via enscript, but no cvsgraph) Integrates well with Trac Used by VideoPresence (Rhys Hawkins)

11. 11 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL GNU Arch Each revision is uniquely globally identifiable –Source tree depth scalability –allows easy merging Decentralised: –Local copies read only, no need for authorised access, work offline, publish changeset, modifications manually merged by head developer + Allows renaming, atomic commits… - Difficult to learn, large command set, unusual naming conventions (difficult to port), doesn’t scale well (width).

12. 12 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL BitKeeper, BK/Web Proprietary Community version known from Linux kernel development

13. 13 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Part B Bug/feature tracking systems

14. 14 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Bugzilla Generic web-based bug tracking system, developed and used by the Mozilla foundation Requires web server and D/B Anyone can submit bugs, assigned to developers, status updates, user notes, code examples AG dev team uses it

15. 15 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Trac Minimalistic approach to web-based project management Combines: –Wiki –Issue/bug tracking database –Interface to svn Using wiki markup it builds a network of links between bugs/issues/tasks, code changes, wiki text, documentation and source files

16. 16 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Trac (2) Relatively good support from the community: –Scripts for ticket and bug data importing and conversion from other systems (Bugzilla, SourceForge, Mantis) –Scripts have limitations => manual editing may be required –Written in Python as a single CGI script and can be extended easily with plug-ins (webadmin interface, account manager) Uses SQLite d/b Supports syntax colouring RSS feeds for the Trac browser to follow specific dir/file Future integration with CVS and Arch

17. 17 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Mantis Web-based bug-tracking system in beta phase Written in PHP, requires MySQL and webserver Claims to be lightweight: –Core system supports basic functionality –Advanced features come modular in PHP Not tied to any specific RCS

18. 18 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Part C Static analysis tools

19. 19 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Static analysis tools Programs that examine source code and report on possible weaknesses Source code checking: –Security vulnerabilities flawfinder: useful for quickly finding and removing at least some potential security problems before a program is widely released to the public –Memory leaks Software Assurance Metrics and Tool Evaluation –systematic set of activities that ensures that software processes and products conform to requirements, standards, and procedures

20. 20 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Part D Testing tools

21. 21 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Testing tools Unit test –UCL common library

22. 22 28-30 Nov. 2005SUMOVER Workshop, UCL Your feedback What CMS/bug tracking systems are you using? Why would you prefer one system over another? Most common tasks? Problems experienced? Management overhead? Size of development team? A system to serve the mbone tools development community for the longer term