TurtleSpira Plugin Released to Integrate Spira with TortoiseGit and TortoiseSVN

23-Jul-2020 by Inflectra Product News

We are pleased to announce the release of the new plugin for the popular TortoiseGit and TortoiseSVN source code management clients that integrates SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan with Tortoise. This lets developers streamline their code management workflows and easily associate code revisions with requirements, tasks and incidents assigned to them in Spira.

What is Tortoise?

Tortoise is a family of Windows Explorer shell extensions that helps programmers manage different versions of the source code for their programs directly inside the standard Windows Explorer user interface. There are different versions of Tortoise that are compatible with different version control systems such as Git, Subversion, Mercurial, and CVS.

What Does TurtleSpira Do?

The Spira issue-tracker plugin for Tortoise (called TurtleSpira) works with all variants of Tortoise, including TortoiseGit,TortoiseSVN, and TortoiseCVS, and lets you streamline your workflow for linking source code commits / revisions to assigned artifacts in SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan.

The Tortoise plugin system lets you integrate different issue trackers. With such plugins it is possible to fetch information directly from the issue tracker, interact with the user and provide information back to Tortoise about open issues, verify log messages entered by the user and even run actions after a successful commit to e.g, close an issue.

Committing a Code Change Linked to Spira Artifacts

As an example, consider the case of committing a change using Tortoise, and associating that change with artifacts in Spira that are assigned to your user.

For example, you might be fixing a bug, implementing a feature, or completing a task associated with a requirement. When you choose the menu option in Tortoise to commit the change, it displays the following dialog box:

You would click on the Choose Artifact button on the top-right of the dialog box:

This screen will list all of the Spira requirements, tasks, and incidents assigned to you. Simply select the checkboxes of the items you want to associate with this commit operation and click OK:

The plugin will automatically populate the list of requirements, tasks and incidents into the commit text. Now click the OK button to commit the change:

Check the box of any tasks that you want the plugin to automatically close for you in Spira. If the source code revision completed all the work on the task, you should check the box. If the revision was merely part of the task, you should leave it unchecked.

In addition, there is a checkbox which will tell the plugin to add the commit text as comments onto all the selected artifacts.

Once that has been done, you will see the following comments appear in Spira:

Why Did We Create TurtleSpira?

One of the key missions of Inflectra is to help Developers, Testers and Managers work together in Harmony:

So, adding tools to make the lives of developers easier and reduce the number of steps to committing code fits with that ethos. It makes the lives of testers and managers easier by guaranteeing there is traceability from code changes to the work that has been planned for each release or sprint.

How Do I Get TurtleSpira?

To get the new plugin, please go to the Add-Ons and Downloads section of the SpiraTeam website:

From there, you can download the TurtleSpira plugin and install it onto any computer running Tortoise. The full documentation is available in the TurtleSpira section of SpiraDoc.