Effectively Managing "My Tickets" in Trac

[Keith Fetterman]

I could use some help in understanding how to effectively manage the tickets in Trac that I own and are assigned to me.  I would really appreciate it if others could share how they are using Trac to manage their tickets.

Briefly, here is the problem I have.  When I click on the "My Tickets" report, I have 16 tickets under "Accepted" and 35 tickets under "Owned".  In the "Accepted" section, I have 5 critical, 6 major and 5 minor priority tickets.  In the "Owned" section, I have 2 critical, 20 major and many minor priority tickets.

Ideally, I would like to rank this list in the order that I need to work on the tickets.  The priority doesn't seem to work because we use it identify the seriousness/importance of the ticket and there can be many tickets that are grouped in the same priority.

What is the most effective way to use "accepted" versus "owned", and rank the lists in the order you plan to work on them?  One thought I had was to mark the tickets I am currently working on as "accepted".  The other tickets that I will be working on in the future will be marked as "owned".  

The problem with this is the size of the "owned" tickets becomes quite large and they are also not rank ordered in the order I need to work on them.  They are grouped by priority, but the groups are large and I don't have a way to rank each group.

I would really appreciate any feedback folks can provide.

Thanks,

Keith

[Greg Troxel]

Keith Fetterman <kfett...@gmail.com> writes:

> What is the most effective way to use "accepted" versus "owned", and rank
> the lists in the order you plan to work on them? One thought I had was to
> mark the tickets I am currently working on as "accepted". The other
> tickets that I will be working on in the future will be marked as "owned".

My take is that 'accepted' should denote that you are actively working
on the ticket. However, accepted vs assigned to you is really a matter
of communicating within your project team, and there is no extrinsic
right and wrong.

> The problem with this is the size of the "owned" tickets becomes quite
> large and they are also not rank ordered in the order I need to work on
> them. They are grouped by priority, but the groups are large and I don't
> have a way to rank each group.

I don't understand why you feel the need to create a total ordering of
all of your tickets. My advice is that once you've figured out what
you'll do this week, accept those, do it, and repeat.

Overall I have three bits of advice:

You should have this discussion with your project team. The team
should have written norms that explain the work process, or at least a
shared understanding.

If you can figure out what you need to do next, that's most of the
battle. Figuring out what can fit in a month/quarter is useful too,
but strictly ordering them doesn't seem necessary.

If you really must order, you (or the trac admin, rather) can add a
new field to trac, and you can put in integers from 0 to 100, and you
can sort by that. But I don't think that's a good use of effort.

[Keith Fetterman]

Greg,

Thank you for responding.  I really appreciate it.

I can see your point that total ordering isn't necessary, and I can see it will take a lot of effort updating the ordering as priorities change.

I am still at a loss to understand how best to manage the tickets that are not "accepted".   I can see your idea on keeping the "accepted" tickets to the ones you are currently working on or will work on this week.  

  If you can figure out what you need to do next, that's most of the 
  battle.  Figuring out what can fit in a month/quarter is useful too, 
  but strictly ordering them doesn't seem necessary. 

This is what I am really trying to understand in how to effectively use Trac to manage.   If I have 150 open tickets in Trac, grouped into 6 categories, what is the best way to identify the tickets that should be worked on following the ones currently being worked on? 

We are not using Trac to manage the development of a software product.  If we were, I guess we would be grouping these tickets into milestones, and periodically, the development team would be meeting to discuss which tickets would be in each milestone.  Then each developer would choose their "accepted" tickets from the current milestone pool of tickets.  Then I am also assuming that tickets that are assigned to a version, would also need to be grouped into a milestone.  

We are using a single instance of Trac to manage changes to a Web site and other applications, and we are using Trac to manage system administration tasks. 

Where I get confused in using Trac is when we have a large number of tickets that are a "Major" or "Minor" priority and some of these tickets should be worked on before others, how do you put them into some kind of order.

I appreciate your feedback and helping me how to effectively use Trac.

Keith

[Steffen Hoffmann]

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On 07.12.2012 19:31, Keith Fetterman wrote:
> Where I get confused in using Trac is when we have a large number of
> tickets that are a "Major" or "Minor" priority and some of these tickets
> should be worked on before others, how do you put them into some kind of
> order.
>
> I appreciate your feedback and helping me how to effectively use Trac.

You should think about using ticket keyword for another way to
categorize. The TagsPlugin [1] extends that into general support for
tagged resources across you whole Trac, not just tickets. It provides
i.e. nice visualization (tag cloud), customizable listing of tagged
resources and mass tag modifications (admin area).

I use it myself for escalation and highlighting in different situations.
With distinct, intuitive keywords its very powerful, still clear and
simple.

Just in case you'll want to check it out, use the `trunk` development
code for now. It is current release candidate for tags-0.7, and the
stable release is largely obsolete these days.

Steffen Hoffmann

[1] http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TagsPlugin
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[Keith Fetterman]

Thanks Steffen for the suggestion to use keywords and the TagsPlugin.  We are currently running Trac version 0.11.7.  I will investigate if I need to upgrade to the latest to use the TagsPlugin.

[Benjamin Lau]

Another handy things I've done in the past is to create a page for
myself in trac which makes it easy for others to assign tickets to me
and for me to see what I need to work on in the future (backlog), what
I'm working on now (current tasks) and a subset of what I've finished
recently (since those are the ones I'll need to refer to in e-mail for
the next month or so).

To do this I put a structure like this on the page:

Create new '''[/newticket?type=task&owner=ben
task]|[/newticket?type=defect&owner=ben
defect]|[/newticket?type=enhancement&owner=ben enhancement]''' for ben

||'''Backlog'''
([[TicketQuery(owner=ben,status!=closed&status!=accepted,format=count)]])||
\
||'''Active Tasks'''
([[TicketQuery(owner=ben,status=accepted,format=count)]])|| \
||'''Completed in the past 30 days:'''
[[TicketQuery(owner=ben,status=closed,format=count,modified=30daysago..)]]
'''All time:'''
[[TicketQuery(owner=ben,status=closed,format=count)]]||
||[[TicketQuery(owner=ben,status!=closed&status!=accepted,format=table,col=summary,order=changetime,desc=true)]]||
\
||[[TicketQuery(owner=ben,status=accepted,format=table,col=summary,order=changetime,desc=true)]]||
\
||[[TicketQuery(owner=ben,status=closed,format=table,col=summary,modified=30daysago..,order=modified,desc=1)]]||

Just replace "ben" in all the places it occurs with your login name in
your trac instance and you can see how this works. Not sure if I'm
using anything that's not compatible with 0.11.

The problem I'm still trying to solve is how do you track 'microtasks'
basically things that are so quick to do that the overhead of creating
a ticket in Trac is larger than the task itself. But so far I haven't
come up with a solution. A former colleague of mine created a
bookmarklet which let you highlight a string of text on any page in
your browser and it would create a ticket from it using the selected
text as the summary. But that kind of requires that the task have a
textual description in your browser... For now I just leave those
along and only track task that are over a certain scale (2+ hours of
effort).

Ben

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[Steffen Hoffmann]

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On 09.12.2012 17:52, Keith Fetterman wrote:
> Thanks Steffen for the suggestion to use keywords and the TagsPlugin.
> We are currently running Trac version 0.11.7. I will investigate if I
> need to upgrade to the latest to use the TagsPlugin.

No, you don't need to upgrade Trac as a requirement. I still care for
0.11, but you may want to upgrade later on for getting all the more
recent Trac features like localized web-UI, side-by-side wiki editor,
instant preview for ticket changes, and last but not least the new site
styling.

Steffen Hoffmann

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[Keith Fetterman]

Hi Ben,

This sounds very cool.  When you say "page", do you mean to create a new Wiki page?  Secondly, will this appear like a report?  I have not seen code like this before.  I have modified existing reports, but in those cases, I was editing SQL.

Thanks for posting this.

Keith

[Benjamin Lau]

It's a wiki page. I've used the report feature before but settled on this as more useful for my needs. I keep other stuff on the page like a list of all my blog posts and my personal development notes.

It shows up as a table with lists of tickets. If you've got a trac instance with tickets assigned to you give it a try.

Ben

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/trac-users/-/6-qkouGawm8J.