WISE - in depth [2]


 W I S E : D O C U M E N T A T I O N 

Introduction
  1. Motivation
  2. Summary
  3. Why World Wide Web?
  4. Where this project fits in
  5. Tool Description
  6. Current Status
  7. Acknowledgements

Motivation

Watts Humprey in his book "Managing the Software Process" states "The most disastrous mistakes are often made when the project is under the greatest schedule pressure. These are often caused by a loss of change control that started with a quick object patch. While the harried programmers invariably intended to document their changes whenever there was time, it is extremely difficult to remember precisely what was done and why". Automated systems that handle change requests, problem reports, activity log entries, provide an excellent platform for tracking the status of the project. The WISE problem tracker is a change management system that helps one keep track of problems, maintain record of changes, solved problems, issues, bugs. Change management being one of the fundamental activities of software engineering, an automated tool like the WISE problem tracker can be of immense help to coordinate the work on a project, distribute effort, help control of discrepancies, log of all entries, and helps maintain a continuous flow of data between the various groups. What initially started as software programmers do's list (Things to do) the problem tracker helps by not only tracking the problems but keeping every member of the group in touch with the unsolved and pending requests/issues. It also serves as a performance indicator.
Summary
Integrated Software Environment (WISE) is a system for managing issue reports within a software development effort. Access to documents and life cycle of issue reports can be managed by an automated tool revolving around the Web. Browsers like Mosaic/netscape and other user programs that can access the WWW can be used for this automating effort. Among the many advantages that such an automated effort would bring to a development group some of the key advantages are

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Why World Wide Web?

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Where this project fits in
What this project proposes to do is to design and implement a problem tracking tool on the Web. The clients would run a browser program and a centralized project server would serve the requests of the clients. With the vast variety of browser programs for Unix based, Macintosh Based, Window based systems, one can access the WWW with great ease.
Tool Description

The user of the tool specifies the URL (Uniform Resource locator) of the information server and views the document accessed. He/She may perform one of the many kind of operations like logging a problem, viewing existing problems, viewing by priority, view all closed problems. He could also login bug reports, change requests, discrepancies. The backend is an Oracle Data- base. Every time a user selects an option, a query containing the users interest is sent to the backend through a gateway that helps connect tot he underlying database. The information server returns with the data and the user views them. The above was a very elementary picture of the kind of activities this tool could be put to use for.
Current Status

We now have a prototype tool working. The current version of the WISE tool would allow you to view all existing problems stored in an Oracle Database. Form support for the same has been created using GSQL and the layout has been completed. The working version is served by our gateway at hardy a DEC machine running RISC - ULTRIX 4.3. The backend is Oracle V 6.0. The browser should be one which can access the World Wide Web like Mosaic, netscape, lynx. A WWW server that can understand HTTP. We are now working on problem log part and issue life cycle information and giving the layout a finer touch.

Acknowledgements

We thank Jason likkai at NCSA, James Pitkow at Georgia Tech for their help. We also thank a number of people at NASA IV&V facility at Fairmont and CERC. Thanks to our research group - a very talented group, they gave useful feedback.

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