git2mine

A python application aimed to make easier the tedious task of logging time for Redmine tasks by extracting information from GIT commits comments.

Purpose

My experience so far, working as software developer for different companies, indicates that:

For most of the project management approaches, the developer must report how much time he or she took to fix a bug, implement a change or a new functionality. Being, on the other hand, version control systems a practical need for code management implies spending some time writing change descriptions and using them as messages for each code commit/version/...

Thus, SW developers trend to write at least two descriptions for each task we complete:

1. A commit message.
2. A time log entry for the project management system.

Personally, I found myself writing essentially the same text for (1) and (2) and that's the reason I decided to write a little script aimed to mine the messages registered at the VCS (1) and use them as time reports for the issue tracker (2). Being GIT and Redmine the VCS and project management tools I interact with at work I wrote my script for working with them.

How does it work?

First, once the application has been installed in your system using PyPi's pip, you can start it by invoking

mineCommits

Obviously, the application won't be creative concerning your spent times and issue ids, its user must add some suggar to her/his commit messages. This is the format currently recognized expressed as a (roughly simplified) regular expression:

[CI|NF|BUG|INT] <\d+(h|m)> \d+ : .+

The actual re accepts from 0 to n spaces between each expression's element.

Some use examples:

• [NF] <2h> 1898: Implemented inversion counting algortithm
• [BUG] <15m> 9000: Changed label translation in the main window...
• [CI] <8h> 8258: Improved core engine performance, now the solution calculation is calculated within 24h
• [INT] <1m> : Added *.so to .gitignore

NF, BUG, CI and INT stand for:

• BUG: A bug fix.
• CI: Change Improvement.
• INT: Some internal task or change unnoticeable by the user.
• NF: New functionality.

Known issues (Hopefully to be fixed soon)

• The connection parammeters to the Redmine server has been always tested providing the user REST key you can get at http://YOUR_REDMINE_URL/my/account. It doesn't seem to work with user/password identification.
• After clicking at "Check, apply and load Activities" button, the application GUI hangs until the connection has been established