Now that QB2 is released, I would like to suggest a new feature that could add a lot of power to the system for use in a large enterprise.

Large enterprise companies like to have nice reports and statistics for everything. Well, in our case, we would like to track, graph, report on various parameters that we come up with. One example that we need is to track the REASON a build FAILED. You currently have the success rate graphable and reportable in the statistics area, but that only tracks success/fail. We would like to track the REASON a build failed. Since the reason a build failed cannot be automated and requires human investigation, I propose you add the ability to attach user defined parameters to a build object. Therefore, when a build fails, we could perform the necessary manual investigation to figure out the reason, and then go to the QB2 web interface and navigate to the overview page of the failed build, and then enter in our customized parameter values. For example, we could come up with a parameter called FAILURE_REASON that can have 1 have 3 possible values, IT, CM, or DEV denoting the IT group, the CM group, or the Development group. Then we could use the overview page and select one of those values for the parameter for the failed build.

Then you could write a generic statistics plugin that could graph the history of our customized parameters. If the parameter had numerical values, you could line plot it. If the parameter had an enumerated range of values (like my example above), you could bar chart it and give percentages for each. Stuff like that. You can imagine the large number of possibilities this new feature can have.

We are currently having to do all of this manually by writing a java QB API program that extracts out failed builds from QB server and adds them to a database. Then we wrote a custom web application that humans could use to enter the reason a build failed by choosing one of the 3 options listed in my example which get saved to the database. then we use crystal reports to graph the results. This would be SO much better if it was integrated with QB2 web interface.

My company is willing to fund this effort if you think it will help you implement this new feature. Thanks.