Bugzilla Makes Big Trucks Better
By: Rob Reilly
Monday, October 9, 2006 10:19:18 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6319/1/
Bugzilla Flavored Applications?
Komatsu, produces a broad range of large mining and construction equipment in its Peoria facilities. The complex manufacturing process cranks out huge machines made up of thousands of parts.
Needless to say, keeping projects and quality on track is an equally monumental job.
Larry Merritt-Gilbert, senior analyst for Komatsu enlisted the help of R Cubed Technologies. R Cubed's President, Nate Rockhold and Corporate Technology Officer, Joe Ryner specialize in building custom Linux-based applications. They also sell a line of lightweight Linux-powered laptops.
Adapting the popular Open Source Bugzilla framework proved a great way to track the Komatsu manufacturing process.
Komatsu needed a flexible web-based system to track quality issues during manufacturing. The company trend is to use web portal type solutions, instead of traditional client/server implementations. Merritt-Gilbert had used Bugzilla in previous projects, when he was at 3Com. He liked the notification features and wanted to be able to rename fields. He also liked that Bugzilla was developed in Perl and MySQL and that it had a template system. With customizing in mind, it was much easier to use Bugzilla than a proprietary solution.
Users also needed to be able to add or change new fields, on-the-fly. Report writing was important, too.
As with any project tracking solution, life cycle was the key. Keeping a history of changes let everybody see bottlenecks and pinpoint areas of improvement.
The project started in September 2004 with Komatsu installing Bugzilla version 2.16. Merritt-Gilbert then mapped out the whole project tracking process and nailed down who could establish new tracking projects. He also specified who could approve work flow tickets and how they were moved through the system. At the same time, Rockhold spent a few weeks familiarizing himself with the Bugzilla code. Collectively user requirements and a handful of mock up interface screens were created.
Collaboration between Komatsu, R Cubed, and users occurred over the phone and via email. Occasional in-person meetings, while sometimes necessary, were minimized because of the 80 mile round trip distance between Komatsu and R Cubed.
Naturally, it made perfect sense to use Bugzilla to track the development effort, as well.
Merritt-Gilbert eventually modified several of the modules to facilitate user updating and adding of fields.
Expansion And Maintenance
There are now three different versions of the Komatsu/Bugzilla tracking system. All are hosted on Red Hat 3 or 4 based servers in Komatsu data centers. Daily dumping of the database and integrity checking happen every night using cron jobs and scripts.
User issues are handled through Merritt-Gilbert and Ken Ryburn of the Komatsu IT group.
New features include the ability to export to Excel and create PDF formatted reports directly from the project database. Rockhold provided a button on the interface to build a link to the HTMLDocs program, that then generated the PDFs.
The ability for a user to search custom fields was another important expansion feature. The team ran into trouble with MySQL, because it originally could only handle 31 left joins. Rockhold was able to modify the MySQL code to increase the number to 63.
Finally, the team implemented a way to search for a part number and bring up a TIFF drawing of the CAD part model. TIFFs are exported and saved from the Unigraphics 3D modeler and 2D drawing package.
Tracking Results
Merritt-Gilbert said that Komatsu has seen significant gains in product quality although he declined to share any hard numbers.
He has been encouraged that as internal groups become aware of the Bugzilla project tracking application, they want to use it. Several of Komatsu's 3rd party vendors has access to the system, now.
Rockhold has no immediate plans for R Cubed to market the Bugzilla project tracking concept to other companies.
The Bugzilla based Komatsu manufacturing project tracking application is just one more example of companies utilizing the power of Open Source Software to streamline business processes.
Rob Reilly is a consultant, trend spotter, and writer. He is a contributing editor for Linux Today. He advises clients on portable business computing and presentation technology integration. You can visit his web page at http://home.earthlink.net/~robreilly.