Reside-IC

Like most technical teams we use an issue tracker to manage our work. Our tool of choice for this is YouTrack. We also make extensive use of GitHub and to synchronise our workflow across the two platforms we name our git branches with YouTrack ticket ids, so every pull request corresponds to a ticket. This naming convention makes it easier to track work in progress across the two platforms, plus the custom tool we use to deploy our software can use git to look at which branches have been merged in and auto-update the corresponding YouTrack tickets.

An issue moves through 5 states before deployment:

1. issue created
2. issue in progress
3. review requested
4. review submitted - either changes are requested and issue moves back to step 2, or code is merged and issue proceeds to step 5
5. issue ready for deploy

In the web development team we use an Agile board in YouTrack to track an issue through these states and to know whether an issue is waiting for us to review it, or changes to our code have been requested; others who are not using an Agile board prefer to monitor GitHub. Given the diversity of our team some divergence of workflows is inevitable, so rather than trying to force everyone into the same habits we decided to use a webhook to automatically keep tickets and branches in sync.

This is a small Flask app that accepts payloads from GitHub whenever a pull request related action is taken and uses the YouTrack API to update the relevant ticket. A small config file maps GitHub users to YouTrack users, so that when a code review is requested on GitHub, the YouTrack ticket gets assigned to the relevant person and marked as “Submitted”. Similarly when code changes are requested the ticket gets assigned back to the author and marked as “Reopened”. When a pull request is merged the ticket gets marked as “Ready to deploy”.

Code and a full README for the webhook can be found at: https://github.com/reside-ic/youtrack-integration