List of defects that caused the most build failures
Can anyone suggest a way to generate a list of the defects that caused the most builds to fail in the last X days?
Each time a build fails it is associated with at least one work item, and from each defect I can see a "Reported against builds" section in the links, so the data exists but I don't know how to extract it. |
7 answers
The "reported against build" links are usually for work items manually created, reporting an issue against the build. You typically have different ones for each build, though it's possible to associate the same work item with multiple builds.
These aren't usually the work items that caused the breakage though. Work items associated with changes that went into the build show up as "included in build" links. But since multiple changes typically go into a given build, it's not always easy to assign "blame" to a given work item, at least not automatically. Either way, as you say, this info is available but it's not straightforward to extract. The reporting support does let you track trends about build/test failures over time, but the kind of "blame" reporting for specific work items you describe is not available out-of-the-box. It should be possible to do something like this via the Java client APIs though. I'd need more details about how you'd really want this to work to make more specific recommendations. |
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We're currently manually reporting work items against a failed build. Sometimes this involves associating an existing work item sometimes it's creating a new work item.
In my current project some issues cause several builds to fail and it'd be nice to work out which issues are more frequent. Such issues may have no relation to the latest codechanges added to the build (the included in field) they may be occasional issues with the build / test infrastructure - eg build machines falling over or running out of space, or servers being unavailable for maintenance or timing issues with the test code that only present every few builds. Also sometimes we can check in code that breaks all subsequent builds and we don't fix it until several builds have run - so a simple build break can be reported against several builds. I'd like to be able to say which issues, have been reported against the most builds recently, so we can try to fucus on fixing or preventng these issues. We've already got an RTC dashboard showing the recent health of the last X builds for each build type and it'd be nice to have something on the dashboard saying what caused the failures - but even a text / csv file of defects reported against recent builds would be useful. |
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You could create a work items query for unresolved work items having a "Reported Against Builds" link. When you click the plus icon for "Add Condition..." in the query editor, be sure to check "Show links" so the "Reported Against Builds" condition is included in the list.
In the web UI, you can then edit the query to include a column for the "Reported Against Builds" links (the Work Items view in the Eclipse UI doesn't seem to support this). Here's an example: https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.runSavedQuery&id=_U_z7QECCEeGPa5QvFRj-Ig You can also export as CSV from here. |
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I've now got a semi automated process where I manually grab the csv file and then run a script to produce an ordered list of the defects that have had the most build failures associated with them (or their duplicates or their duplicates duplicates etc...)
It'd be nice if I could get this fully automated using BIRT or something so I could embed the info in a dashboard but I can at least get the infomation for now. thanks |
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I just created the following enhancement request:
Query work items reported against a build This will be very useful IMHO for managers as a way of finding out known issues associated with a build being promoted to an environment like Production. Better yet will be the ability to diff snapshots of 2 builds, find out all *open* work items reported in the diff, and you get a better sense for the risk in promoting a build to an environment. |
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The request I raised for the original thread issue is Enable searching and ordering of work items by numbers of links.
(related to but not quite the same as vivekiyer's) |
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