Sneak Peek on 2022: GitHub Actions comes to Spira

December 2nd, 2021 by inflectra

github azure devops microsoft continuous delivery tfs

As we start preparing for 2022, we will be providing some information on our plans for 2022, including some previews of planned functionality in our Spira and Rapise platforms. One of the key plans for 2022 is a closer integration of our Spira platform with Microsoft GitHub. For those monitoring the Microsoft DevOps ecosystem, Microsoft is making a strategic shift away from its legacy Azure DevOps (ADO) in favor of GitHub. In fact, the latest versions of Visual Studio will be favoring GitHub over Azure DevOps.

Microsoft Depreciation of Azure DevOps (ADO)

Our Spira platform has had long-standing support for integrating with Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), Team Services, Visual Studio Online (VSO), and its latest rebrand - Microsoft Azure DevOps (ADO). Our customers can integrate the source code, work item tracking, and Azure DevOps Pipelines features of ADO with SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, and SpiraPlan.

However as is widely known in the industry, Microsoft is advising customers to not migrate to Azure DevOps as it will be a legacy Microsoft platform going forward. Instead, they are recommending that customers plan on adopting their GitHub Enterprise platform instead.

As outlined in the TechTarget article, industry analysts have been recommending its clients plan on migrating from Azure DevOps to GitHub

"the fact that they have a couple plays here in GitHub also shows the continued migration from Azure DevOps to GitHub as their team collaborative DevOps platform,"

Therefore, to ensure that Inflectra customers are ahead of the planned migration effort, we are adding increased integration with GitHub that we are very excited about sharing.

Overview of GitHub Integration

SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan provide multiple levels of integration with GitHub, including the following three use cases:

Integrating GitHub Actions with Releases and Builds in Spira to trigger automation events [planned for early 2022]
Integrating GitHub source code repositories so that you can view changes and have traceability to requirements, tasks, and incidents [available now]
Integrating GitHub issues to that defects raised in Spira will be automatically synchronized with issues in GitHub [available now]

GitHub Actions Integration

The new integration with GitHub actions will allow you to execute a GitHub pipeline directly from the Spira user interface. In addition, the GitHub pipelines may be automatically triggered by source code commits or other events from within GitHub itself.

Whenever a GitHub pipeline executes (either from Spira or via normal source code commit events), the new GitHub pipeline event will be recorded in Spira as a new build:

These GitHub pipeline events will show up in Spira as a new Build under the Release artifact:

When you click on the Build in Spira you can see the build details (including the console log) as well as the associated source code commits, incidents and other associated artifacts.

This functionality is similar to what is already available for tools like Jenkins and TeamCity as well as Azure DevOps Pipelines.

GitHub Source Code Integration

Spira includes powerful integration with Git code repositories, including the code repositories hosted in GitHub. From within Spira, you can view the list of folders and files in a branch as well as view the commits in specific branches.

Spira includes the ability to quickly and easily drill down onto a specific commit and see the files that have changed, with inline code difference viewing. The Associations tab lets you have traceability from every code change made in the application to the relevant requirement, incident, or task that necessitated the change.

GitHub Issue Integration

The third aspect of the GitHub integration is the ability to synchronize the Spira incident tracker with the issue tracking module of GitHub projects:

You can log new incidents, bugs, and defects in Spira, either during testing or just ad-hoc, and have them synchronize seamlessly over to GitHub (and vice-versa):

Within GitHub you can see the incidents and make changes, including assigning developers, adding comments, and making changes to the issue priority, status or description. Those changes are then automatically reflected back in Spira.

What Does This Mean for You?

As you begin your planned migration journey from Azure DevOps (ADO) to GitHub Enterprise (or other tools such as GitLab) for continuous integration and continuous deployment, you can use your same SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan instances with the integration to ADO today and then switch over to the new integrations with GitHub as your projects make the switch.

In addition, we have recently enhanced the Microsoft Azure DevOps (ADO) migration tool that lets you migrate requirements, test plans, and defect work items into SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan from ADO.