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What features of a bug and issue tracker are most important to you?
I’m curious.
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Inappropriate?1. Clear comment source/time information
2. Count of bugs assigned, and their status
3. Clear, easy priority mechanism
In looking at the screencast and screenshot, I'm pretty content that you nail those. I would add one more, then:
What about a sidebar "links" area for each issue/bug, for manually adding links to supplemental material—specs, related bugs, e-mails, etc.? We (msnbc.com) are eyeballing Sifter to sit between us and our technical team's use of Sharepoint and Product Studio to track issues. We want to pull issues relevant to our team out of their release-oriented issue tracker and into a fresh, flexible, *friendly* issue tracker. Being able to link to a Sharepoint doc or a parallel bug IDs in P(o)S would be helpful.
I know we could easily do this inline in posts regarding the issue, but I'd rather see them separated to keep focus on fixing things rather than reading things. It would help separate attention: URLs for examples and repro cases in the comments, supplemental reading in the sidebar for long-term issues. If an issue lives for a while, I can imagine we might have 2 or 3 versions of a spec over the lifetime of the issue. A central, consistent place showing versioning would be better than reading through all the comments trying to find the most recent version. -
Inappropriate?Quickly off the top of my head:
Must have:
Categorisation (of some sort - tags or customisable categories)
Priority
Assignment and reassignment
Status ('new', 'in progress', 'complete', 'works for me', 'can't replicate', etc) - customisable
Searchable
Filter by assignee (obviously including 'me') with email notifications and/or RSS feed
Filter by status
Filter by status AND assignee
File uploads (in particular screenshots)
Should have:
Duplicate handling
Record OS+browser with bug report
Could have:
Milestone releases (assign bugs to milestone)
I’m happy to be asked
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Inappropriate?Tiff - It sounds like we'll be handling the first three, but we definitely won't have anything like the sidebar links out of that gate. Just to make sure I'm understanding, it sounds like you'd just like a central location to pull together references to files and external materials without having to read the whole story? If that's the case, that's something that will get much more attention when we implement file uploading.3 Comments
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No problems with a sidebar being out-the-gate. But I would advocate that it take into account the fact that uploading documents works for small teams who use Sifter as their main hub, but it doesn't quite fit for larger teams who have information scattered around a bunch of places (where they rightfully belong based on authoring team). What I'm thinking of, in particular, is an area up near the top with a set of manually maintained links that could point to specific intranet Sharepoint URLs, intranet fileshare paths, links to similar bugs in other teams' bug tracking systems or even online documents like Writeboards, a Wiki or Google Docs. At msnbc.com, we use that full range to manage requests from different departments, and wouldn't be able to upload them all -- nor should we. For example, if a PM on a different team owns a spec that's tied to an issue we have in Sifter, we shouldn't upload a new, then-detached copy, but rather point to it. Even if it's only a reference to a bug discussion in Sifter. Did I do a better job of explaining it? -
Yeah, that makes plenty of sense. It sounds like you'd like a way for it to serve as a central hub for tying together multiple different sources and systems.
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Yup! I'm sure we'll find a way to do so within the initial release. But keep it in mind!
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Inappropriate?Richard - I think we've got most of your first list covered. The statuses will be very limited (Open/Reopened, Resolved, Closed) because I've found that categories work to support some of the other statues. For instance, "Works for Me" could be viewed as a description of the Resolution rather than a status itself, and categories will be completely customizable on a project-by-project basis.
For file uploads, you might be a little disappointed with the initial release. Our new timeline has us launching earlier instead of waiting until we implement file uploads. However, it's right there at the top of the list for things to add as soon as it's released.
Duplicate handling won't be formally supported, but you can use "#123" (or any issue number) in the body or comments of an issue, and it will automatically create a hyperlink to that issue. I've got some ideas for how we can make it more robust in the future for explicitly supporting some other scenarios like duplicates without complicating things too much.
For recording OS and browser, there's no specific feature for addressing that just yet. For the initial release, my thoughts are that the category field could provide support for specifying explicit browser/OS. I hate to add a dedicated field for something like that because browser/OS isn't relevant to every kind of issue/bug there is. Also, I do have some ideas for allowing a customizable block of text that could be auto-populated into the new issue description field so as to guide the creation of new issues.
Finally, milestones/releases are another item that's pretty high on the list, but we've decided to overlook them for the initial release because there's a lot of room for interpretation. I've thought of several potential solutions, but right now it's hard to tell which one is truly the right one. So, I want to get it out in everyone's hands and base this feature off of real feedback.
Hope that helps. Thanks for joining the conversation. -
Inappropriate?Thanks for the prompt reply Garrett. We're really excited about seeing Sifter.
Regarding file uploads, it's really just screenshots we'd need to upload. I dare say we could find suitable workarounds for that, especially if automatic linking of things which look like URLs were to be implemented (so we could link to photos in a private Flickr group or something similar).
The duplicate handling approach you mention sounds perfectly acceptable to me. I also agree with your opinion on the browser/OS thing, it's just useful sometimes to remind people (especially clients and beta testers) to provide the OS and platform, and it's even handier to auto-generate that.
I’m well chuffed
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Inappropriate?I'm going to be all geek for a second. I'd like to see a good API. An issue tracker with a clean RESTful API (really RESTful, rather than just HTTP based would be a bonus) would be a lovely thing. What I really want is a command line client - I've been using ditz recently which is a nice tool but more useful personally than in a wider team or with clients. Having something with a simple web interface as well as the ability for people like me who prefer programmatic access or a command line would be great.
I’m interested
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Inappropriate?Gareth - That's definitely on the list, but it's not going to be out of the gate. It's pretty high priority too because I imagine lots of people would like to tie into their internal systems for something like this.3 Comments Add a comment
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Great. I'd rather see it out their without an API if it means an earlier releases, rather than wait for what will probably be a killer feature for a relatively smaller audience. Though I really do want to build a command line client.
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While I know the interface would be a joy, hear hear for a command-line client! You'll share, right, Gareth?
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Of course, probably open source somewhere I would assume. And APIs are user interfaces too.
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Inappropriate?Regarding file uploads, when it gets in there:
* can we upload multiple files with each comment? Our current bug tracker only allows one file per comment.
* can files have permalinks? Sometimes I like to upload an image and display it inline in the post rather than as an attachment. This is impossible with Basecamp's hosted files, as their URLs keep changing.
I’m hopeful!
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Inappropriate?* I definitely expect to be able to do multiple file uploads when it does make it in.
* As for file permalinks, I don't see a reason why not, but at the same time, we're tentatively planning on using Amazon S3, and knowing that Basecamp is using S3 as well, I would wonder if it's an S3 limitation. I definitely would like to have permalinks for files, and I don't plan on giving up easily. :)
I’m confident
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Just discovered Basecamp has permanent redirects to S3's dynamic URLs. Right click and copy a link URL instead of clicking it then copying from address bar. That may be a suitable work-around for your users too, but annoying that it's not documented on Basecamp.
