SCM Meeting 2009-10-07

The initial meeting of the SCM OSLC working group will be held by teleconference on Wednesday October 7th at 12 noon - 1 pm Pacific time.

Agenda:

• Introduce members
• Go over goals of the group
• Discuss working practices, meeting times, etc.
• Review producers, consumers, and business drivers
• Review initial scenarios
• Set up initial tasks and milestones

Details for joining the call can be found on the SCM meeting page

Minutes:

Present: BiancaXueJiang? , EricMinick, EricSink, JasonSmith, SamitMehta, JeanMichelLemieux, JimConallen, NickCrossley, PaulKomar, PeterHack, RobinFuller? , ScottBosworth, SteveAbrams, SteveSpeicher

This first group meeting started with the members introducing themselves.

After the introductions, the group discussed the purpose of the group: to define REST services for specific SCM scenarios, primarily for integrating SCM systems with other tools. The team agreed on the incremental approach, keeping a tight focus on developing one or two scenarios at a time.

All participants agreed on the build story as one of the first ones to be tackled, including the abilities to create a build area in the file system, to see the changes between that configuration at two different points in time, to compare the contents of files (or versions of files) at the two different times, and to create a label, snapshot, or baseline for the configuration.

Nick also believed it important to address the work item integration – to be able to get the change sets associated with a work item, and then to get the version controlled resources associated with one or more of those change sets. Combined with the other OSLC projects, this would provide traceability from requirements through changes to code, tests, etc. It was agreed that there should also be a requirement to navigate in the other direction – from version controlled resources to their associated change sets, work items, change requests, etc.

Nick agreed to start defining these scenarios in more detail, including the scope of SCM services, and to provide some framework on the wiki where the group could expand and comment on the use cases. Terms and concepts would naturally be exposed during this process, highlighting the contents we will need for a glossary. Steve Speicher agreed to help flesh out the CM integration use cases.

Throughout the discussion (and again in later email), several members emphasized that it was important to design an API that would actually be adopted – quoting the lack of adoption of several previous efforts, including WVCM, Eclipse ALF, etc.

There will be many aspects of the SCM API that will share common requirements, services, formats, resources, etc., with other OSLC efforts. Nick will work with Steve Speicher to see where we can both leverage existing common OSLC specifications, and participate in developing such common specifications.

The team agreed to a tentative target towards the end of Q1 2010 for completion of a first phase of a services specification, perhaps aligning with the completion of the CM 2.0 services at the start of March, without defining exactly what would be included in that phase, and without any commitments to implementation.

The team agreed to keep the same day and time for a regular weekly meeting – Wednesday at 12 noon Pacific time.