Question

I am trying to understand what perforce “jobs” provide over an external bug tracking system and just putting the bug ID in the check-in comment.

I was hoping that “job” could help with How do I see if a branch contains a bug fix in Perforce?

Answer 1

As a bugtracker, Perforce jobs are somewhat basic. They can be created and modified with the P4V GUI client or using p4 job and p4 jobs on the command line.

The idea is for them to serve as a link (a connector as Perforce calls it or an interface as a developer might look at it) to a third party issue management system and basically provide the information which changelists were committed for which issue. The issue management system can then tap into this information using the Perforce Defect Tracking Gateway (PDF documentation here) and generate bugfix charts or statistics for management or whatever.

We are using this with Jira in both directions with some success. The basics worked pretty much straight out of the box, more advanced use cases (such as e.g. which bugs were fixes in which release ?) or integration with other bugtrackers may require modification of the Perforce job model.

One of the advantages over tracking changelist and issue numbers using commit comments is that you can select the job/issue from a dropdown box when you commit a changelist using P4V.

In practice, developers tend to forget to add the job information when they commit a changelist. This can be enforced using Perforce triggers.