{"id":192,"date":"2005-07-24T20:32:17","date_gmt":"2005-07-24T20:32:17","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-07-24T20:32:17","modified_gmt":"2005-07-24T20:32:17","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=192","title":{"rendered":"Tracking bugs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Work continues to be very busy.  Partly this is because we&#8217;ve been settled in our new premises for a little while now and people are bringing up all sorts of issues that they had previously kept quiet about; also, now being A Team Of One, rather than One Of A Team Of Two doesn&#8217;t help.  I was hoping to be able to provide a link to the job advert for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.livejournal.com\/users\/diffrentcolours\/\">PerfDave<\/a>&#8216;s replacement today, but the university admin doesn&#8217;t appear to have progressed that far yet.<\/p>\n<p>As a result of the huge number of things to do, I&#8217;ve decided to add to the existing issue-tracking system we have, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bestpractical.com\/rt\/\">Request Tracker<\/a> (RT), in order to<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>keep a proper track on things, and<\/li>\n<li>make my tasks transparent to staff (which has the side-effect of giving them an appreciation of my high workload!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What I&#8217;ve actually done is introduce <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bugzilla.org\/\">Bugzilla<\/a> into the mix.  Typically, this is used for tracking bugs in software, but it lends itself to any situation where there are a large number of issues having dependencies on one another and having different priorities and severities.  I&#8217;m now using RT and Bugzilla like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Request Tracker will be used literally for tracking staff requests: non-trivial things that I am asked about, questions about &#8220;how to &#8230;?&#8221; or whatever.  These requests from staff, and the email correspondence arising from it, are all recorded in the RT system.  RT has been in continuous use since I first installed it in 2001 and has clocked up approximately 1800 &#8216;tickets&#8217; since then, almost all of them being processed by me!  Since some of the issues in RT tickets may be sensitive or perhaps personal, the content of other people&#8217;s tickets is not available to end users.<\/li>\n<li>Bugzilla will be used for keeping track of &#8216;bugs&#8217;, used in the loosest sense to mean &#8220;things that are wrong that need to be fixed&#8221;.  In some cases, these may relate directly to particular RT tickets (for example if someone uncovers a problem with a server or system that needs to be fixed &#8211; rather than a misunderstanding on the user&#8217;s part); in other cases, many RT tickets may relate to the same &#8216;bug&#8217; (for example, a number of people may experience a symptom which is all related to the same underlying issue) and so each ticket can reference the same bug and everyone who reported a similar problem will be able to see the progress of the &#8216;fix&#8217;.  Sometimes, a &#8216;bug&#8217; has no direct relationship to an RT ticket at all, for instance infrastructure issues and problems I notice myself: these are entered into the bug-tracking system and are visible to any staff who care to follow them.  I used to deal with the latter issue by raising an RT ticket to myself(!), but that&#8217;s always struck me as The Wrong Way To Do It and also unnecessarily conceals information from staff about what&#8217;s going on.  The other point of having an &#8216;open&#8217; bug tracker is that any member of staff can add comments to any outstanding issue, which might be helpful, although in practice only a handful of technical staff will be likely to do this.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Both RT and Bugzilla are free, open-source tools and are both excellent pieces of software.  I think it&#8217;s a good decision introducing Bugzilla, particularly.  I plan to make various categories of bug listings easily available to all staff, so that they can view (say) &#8220;all outstanding bugs&#8221;, &#8220;all outstanding &#8216;wishlist&#8217; items&#8221; (bugs categorised as &#8216;wishlist&#8217; are not actual problems, but requests for improvements or enhancements to the existing way of doing things) and so on.  I am hoping that by making the bug-tracking database visible to all staff it will hammer home the point that I really am busy and that when I say Don&#8217;t Phone Me And Don&#8217;t Come To My Office, Please Send Me An Email it&#8217;s because I&#8217;m trying to avoid distractions and stay efficient.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Work continues to be very busy. Partly this is because we&#8217;ve been settled in our new premises for a little while now and people are bringing up all sorts of issues that they had previously kept quiet about; also, now being A Team Of One, rather than One Of A Team Of Two doesn&#8217;t help&#8230;.&nbsp;(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=192\">read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}