Sciit: Aligning Source Control Management and Issue Tracking Architectures

Abstract

This paper presents sciit, a distributed issue tracker. Distributed issue tracking eliminates much of the friction that is otherwise necessitated by separately maintaining source code in a distributed source control management system (SCM) and task information in a centralised issue tracker. Sciit goes beyond the state of the art in distributed issue tracking by treating issues as first class change control items, represented as fragments of text anywhere within the SCM. This approach treats issues as representations of work in progress alongside other project artefacts. This alignment allows much of the meta-data about an issue, such as status, affected components and participants to be inferred directly from the state of the SCM, rather than requiring maintenance of this information by a developer. The paper presents a scenario to illustrate the benefits of sciit and an outline of the tool's architecture.