My company is a custom development shop for a number of projects, some larger and some smaller. Currently we handle all of our client communication through email. So we email a design doc, they mark it up and send it back. Then we roll out a beta version of their product and they email us with any bugs, new features, etc. And so on....
As I am working on implementing a new bug tracking system (it looks like it will be Mantis right now), I got to wondering how we could best allow our customers an interface with our development process that would provide better tracking of feature requests and client submitted bugs as well as communicate our responses back to the client.
If anyone is aware of a a bug tracking system that does this exceptionally well I'd be interested to hear of that. Otherwise I'm just looking for some general guidelines or good business practices that have allowed your companies to interface effectively and efficiently with your clients.
UPDATE: My company uses a LAMPP stack and as we are a small shop with a limited budget we tend to stick to tools that are open-source and free.
Do most people either use Team Foundation Server to handle this or emails back and forth?
I think the key is to have the dedicated tracking system there for bugs/requests, and to establish a set process for communication. With that at minimum you will start getting consistent feedback. From there you can tweak it to get your specific needs.
As an aside, rather than just using e-mail for your communication, I strongly recommend going to smething like BaseCamp for a project management tool. I find that it helps greatly with keeping messages, documentation, and timelines communicated to the client.
If you are using Team Foundation Server, I recommend you to install TeamPlain Web Access. They allow you to expose a web interface to your TFS project. The only things left to do, is give rights to your client and a username and a password.
Otherwise, there is some paying tools like FogBugz. Of course, the principal is having to bug reporting tools directly linked to your Source Control so that the developers can easily fix bugs.
Although I know of no specific tools (at least no open source ones), I suggest that you setup a system which will cover your overall requirements gathering and implementation process. Requirements could be tracked in the system, which would also contain the design documents (which could be "checked out from" and "committed to" the system). This way, you would tackle the problem of having multiple revisions of design documents around. Addionally, the design documents and the requirements could be tracked easily. If this system were linked to your source code management system, you would additionally ease your development process/requirements tracking.
Another possibility is to use two products in concert, here's our current setup with a team of 12:
osTicket for incoming requests from clients
Allows for issues to be handled by support staff and bugs to be verified
Status can be checked with just an email address and ticket ID
Typically users don't submit detailed enough bug reports so is a good first step
redmine for development tickets
Ticket created by QA or a developer if issue is a real bug
Provides solid enough project and release management
Is a solid step up from trac and mantis (and provides migration tools)
Related
I need your help for my question.
I need to build a web based application that should perform some activity of document management. I'm evaluating existing document management solution and I need a solution that expose api via rest or other protocol, so that I can interact with them from my application.
I read about alfresco, sharepoint and knowledge tree but I find difficult to understant prices for commercial use. Can someone help me with a comparison of function/prices for a commercial use?
Alfresco is available in two versions, Alfresco Community Edition and Alfresco Enterprise. Alfresco Community is under the LGPL license. Assuming you want to use it in-house (not distribute it to others), you can use + customise + extend Alfresco Community to your heart's content, without restriction or charge. (LGPL/GPL/etc are distribution licenses, not use licenses, so only kick in when you redistribute). However, Alfresco Community comes with no commercial support, only support provided by the community. For a lot of uses that's good enough, but for other cases you'll want to be able to ring someone for support / get hotfixes backported to your version / etc. In that case...
Alfresco Enterprise is paid for, coming with commercial support (including SLAs, pick up the phone and talk to an expert etc), along with a handful of features that matter in big deployments (clustering being one). Pricing depends on a few things, mostly around size of deployment and SLA, but for small deployments isn't too bad. For big deployments, it can be a huge saving over other systems! Give sales a call, they're very friendly, and only rarely buy me beer ;-)
If you don't want to run your own repo, there's also the Alfresco Cloud version, which comes with a public API. With this, Alfresco themselves run and maintain the instance for you, and you can use the public API to store / retrieve / manage / etc your content. It's much simpler to get going with! But you don't quite get as much control or customisation as with the on-premise versions.
SharePoint might already be covered by your existing Microsoft licensing deal, if you have one. If not, you'd need to decide between licensing on a per-server or per-user basis. See Microsoft pages like this to get an idea of the options, then ring your Microsoft sales rep to get an idea of the pricing. In many cases, you'd need to pay someone else for support, so you'd be back to a similar thing as with Alfresco Community vs Enterprise.
If you're not sure what system to go with, you might be safest and best off implementing your project using CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services). This provides a common way to talk to content repositories, allowing you to store/retrieve/browse/search/permissions/etc irrespective of what the underlying repo is. Alfresco provide some information on it, and Apache Chemistry provides open source client libraries for most common programming languages, which makes getting started very quick. There's also an excellent book on CMIS which I can very much recommend! And not only because the authors of that have been known to buy me beer too... ;-)
At the moment support requests / bug reports made by customers are coming in by mail. It is getting harder to organize priorities and stay at the helm of all this. So I am looking for bugtracking(?) tools. Not all reports are bugs of course, sometimes it's just feature request or support requests.
So my question is: whicht open source bugtracker / support request handling tool do you recommend? I know Mantis which seems to be my front runner for a more elaborate evaluation, but I already worked with it (as a reporter / contributor) and found the GUI a little cumbersome. Another issue is that I thought about using the tool for multiple website projects of different customers.
Intuitively I would prefer to run only one instance of the tool for all projects to have a better overview of all critical issues (independently of the project). Of course customer A should not be able to see customer Bs request (but every customer can have multiple reporting accounts) Is Mantis able to handle that? Can you recommend any other alternatives?
P.S.: I heard about Jira, but I will try to find a free tool for my first try.
It's possible to use email with Mantis, so that you can get incoming email (directly or by forwarding) to Mantis.
Then you can have a workflow in Mantis, f.ex. have an incoming project and customer projects, and you can send email with bcc Mantis and subject containing issue number (I use [1234] as a pattern).
I haven't used other issue trackers as much, but my experience with a customized Mantis is good regarding different kinds of issues and using with email.
Since you're turned to Open source, I'd say install a project management platform like Launchpad, redmine... etc and then create a project for each of your clients (of course you can have multiple accounts for only one client). The bug tracker in these platforms can serve as a support request service.
I'd go for Launchpad because it also has the Q/A feature and blueprints, and is also nice looking and very very user-friendly. And also damn easy to install on a Ubuntu Server.
Kind regards
My company is in need of a task management system to handle scenarios as simple as "Purchase a computer for X" to "Relocate a person to another country". The simple scenarios are a single tasks handled by a single person, whereas bigger tasks can be broken down into multiple sub tasks delegated to multiple people during the workflow. Additionally the clients and vendors need their own views into the process.
We are evaluating different solutions from a custom application built on Workflow Foundation to SharePoint to BPM products like Metastorm and BPM.Net.
Here's my current understanding of these solutions:
Workflow Foundation - Low level workflow designer and/or library with no host environment. It seems we would have to reinvent some wheels if we went this route such as fault tolerance and document management. Some of the answers on stack also cause concerns such as the lack of versioning and a complete overhaul for VS10/.NET 4.0
SharePoint - Built for document management and collaboration but trying to create advanced workflows and tasking on top of that seems like a hack. Plus all workflows have to be tied to either documents or lists. I cant envision how a list (or list of lists) can address this issue.
BPM products - Mature workflow engine at a seemingly high price. BPM.Net is the only solution for which I could find some level of technical detail but im still not sure how different developing against this product would be from developing against Workflow Foundation.
Are there any workflow engines dedicated to solving all the workflow pains that can be easily deployed with their own hosting environment and initiated through a webservice?
Are there any other options I am missing?
Thanks in advance.
****Edit**
To answer the questions below the workflow needs are pretty light. Basic routing of tasks to approvers and subcontractors.
Whats driving us too look deeper than PM software is the nature of the business not the need for advanced workflow. We are basically in the business of procuring goods and services through subcontractors for our clients which can also include full employee relocation. The interface of the package should reflect this by being customer branded as well as intuitive for this line of business.
Basically if im moving my family to the other side of the world Im not sure i'd want to interface with Jira or Sharepoint or any other PM software to facilitate this.
If you are on Microsoft stack I would definitely recommend SharePoint for this scenario. As it seems to be very simple you can go with Windows SharePoint Services edition because it is free and it has everything you need.
You are right when you say that ShartePoint workflow are bit limited. IMHO the best way to overcome that limitation is to purchase Nintex workflow to create your workflows. It is cost effective solution that can help you design workflows you need.
You can find workflow samples inside the product (as workflow templates) and on the web site.
Nothing you mentioned has much to do with workflow. You're just doing project management. If that's the case, a simple bug tracker (like FogBugz! ;) would work - but if you're going to show it externally, it may not be the most professional presentation.
The closest off the shelf solution I can think of would be Project Server - though, depending on the number of projects and project managers, the desktop Project with a sync to a webserver for client views may be enough.
If that's overkill - because your projects don't require a lot of resource scheduling, Gantt charts, or other PM artifacts - you can take something like Trac and replace "bug" with "task". ;) (Seriously though, that'd probably get you 90% of the way there.....)
Have you looked at RT? I believe it can handle all your requirements, including that it's designed to let customers interact with the system by email, rather than having to log into the website. If you've emailed IT support desks then you've probably interacted with it without knowing... You can also completely customise the web interface and allow customer access.
Can't vouch for the quality as I haven't used it, but I did watch an online-demo video of Intalio, which has BPM and workflow capabilities.
We use Basecamp to control this sort of "task management" stuff. I'm not sure if it fits your needs totally, as it's a little light on the document management side, but it has a web service (REST) API, customer / vendor facing components, and basic interaction / chat capabilities.
The best part about it is that the API is simple enough where you can offload a lot of the "management" for it to admin support personnel, like assistants and interns, by providing custom scripts. If you've got people who aren't programmers using it you'll probably have better luck with it than even something like Trac or FogBugz.
I have/am going through a similar process. We wanted a lightweight workflow for internal use by our sales team. Most of the third party apps we looked at ,K2 and Skelta BPM.Net in particular, looked way over the top for what we needed. I'm now 2 months into working with Windows Workflow Foundation 3.0 and I have to say it isn't the most pleasant coding experience I've had.
If your workflows will truely be simple then it is pretty easy to build a workflow and hook it up to some web pages for the UI. But if you need to be able to change it on the fly, or do versioning (ie the user says we want another step added, then its a whole lot of hacking to get it to work - and it only works if you limit your workflow to being really simple), then you are in for a fair bit of work. And forget about it if you use an Oracle database.
The next version of windows workflow will have it's own runtime environment, code name dublin, with will provide a WCF interface into the workflows.
If your timeframe allows you could use that.
For information on Dublin and the next version of WF see:
http://www.microsoft.com/net/dublin.aspx
My vote is for FogBugz. Unless I am missing something in your requirements, why would you want to reinvent the wheel by using a code based workflow solution where you have to code up the flows yourself when you can use a perfectly good project dependency solution like FB or even MS Project Server - which lets you create nice dependencies for resources and people.
Check FileNet
FileNet is expensive but makes a good job with content and process management, but I guess is not what you are looking for.
We use Captaris Workflow, it is pretty good but it may be expensive for your needs.
In my organisation, we have some very inefficient processes around managing requirements, tracking what was actually delivered on what versions, etc, do subsequent releases break previous functionality, etc - its currently all managed manually. The requirements are spread over several documents and issue trackers, and the implementation details is in code in subversion, Jira, TestLink. I'm trying to put together a system that consolidates the requirements info, so that it is sourced from a single, authoritative source, is accessible via standard interfaces - web services, browsers, etc, and can be automatically validated against. The actual domain knowledge is not that complicated but is highly proprietary and non-standard (i.e., not just customers with addresses, emails, etc), and is relational: customers have certain functionalities, features switched on/off, specific datasources hooked up - all on specific versions. So modelling this should be straightforward.
Can anyone advise the best approach for this - I a certain that I can develop a system from scratch that matches exactly the requirements, in say ruby on rails, grails, or some RAD framework. But I'm having difficulty getting management buy-in, they would feel safer with an off the shelf solution.
Can anyone recommend such a system? Or am I better off building it from scratch, as I feel I am? I'm afraid a bought system would take just as long to deploy, and would not meet our requirements.
Thanks for any advice.
I believe that you are describing two different problems. The first is getting everyone to standardize and the second is selecting a good tool for requirements management. I wouldn't worry so much about the tool as I would the process and the people. Having the best tool in the world won't help if your various project managers don't want to share.
So, my suggestion is to start simple. Grab Redmine or Trac and take on the challenge of getting everyone to standardize. Once you have everyone in the right mindset then you can improve the tools you use for storage.
{disclaimer - mentioning my employer's product}
The brief experiments I made with a commercial tool RequisitePro seemed pretty good me. Allowed one to annotate existing Word docs and create a real-time linked database of the identified requisistes then perform lots of analysis and tracking of them.
Sometimes when I see a commercial product I think "Oh, well nice glossy bits but the fundamentals I could knock up in Perl in a weekend." That's not the case with this stuff. I would certainly look at commercial products in this space and exeperiment with a couple (ReqPro has a free trial, I guess the competition will too) before spending time on my own development.
Thanks a mill for the reply. I will take a look at RequisitePro, at least I'll be following the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" strategy ;) youre right, and I kinda knew it, in these situations, buy is better. It is tempting when I can visualise throwing it together quickly, but theres other tradeoffs and risks with that approach.
Thanks,
Justin
While Requisite Pro enforces a standard and that can certainly help you in your task, I'd certainly second Mark on trying to standardize the input by agreement with personnel and using a more flexible tool like Trac, Redmine (which both have incredibly fast deploy and setup times, especially if you host them from a VM) or even a custom one if you can get the management to endorse your project.
I am looking for a simple system to manage inbound emails from a support mailbox for a group with about 3 support people. I've looked at OTRS which seems to have the features that we need. Unfortunately, so far the UI still looks like a confusing mess.
Are there any good FOSS tools that would meet this need? I've heard murmurings that something called fooogzeeebugzo might have similar features, but it seems quite expensive for such simple needs.
Did you try IssueBurner? It was designed for this purpose. You can forward your mailbox (e.g. support#yourcompany.com) to a IssueBurner group and you can track the inbound mails until they are closed.
Here is a link to their video: http://issueburner.com/a/video
I have to agree, Fogbugz is probably the best out there. I have used both the hosted version and the purchased version which I hosted. It is top-notch.
BugTracker.NET is free, open source, and widely used. It has integration with incoming email. In other words, it will accept an incoming email and turn it into a support ticket.
My company recently started using Mojo Helpdesk: www.mojohelpdesk.com. It's a hosted service, not FOSS, but it's pretty cheap and the interface is slick.
TicketDesk- C# issue tracking system and support system
http://www.codeplex.com/TicketDesk
TicketDesk is efficient and designed to do only one thing, facilitate communications between help desk staff and end users. The overriding design goal is to be as simple and frictionless for both users and help desk staff as is possible.
TicketDesk is an asp.net web application written in C# targeting the .net 3.5 framework. It includes a simple database with support for SQL 2005 Express or SQL Server 2005. It can leverage SQL server for membership and role based security or integrate with windows authentication and Active Directory groups.
RT - Request Tracker handles inbound mail. I'm working to add inbound mail support to TicketDesk, but that might be a little while before that makes it into a release.
FogBugz is great as others have mentioned. I use it for my bug/feature tracking system, but I like to separate out my support ticketing system for my support staff to use. Another tool that has great email integration also is called HelpSpot, they have hosted and non-hosted versions for purchase, depending on your budget. It has a lot of great features, that make the prices worth it. Take the tour and see for yourself.
Scope out SmarterTrack, Help Desk Software from SmarterTools:
We use FogBugz...er, "fooogzeeebugzo"...and while it may be a bit expensive for your needs, it works very well.
bugzilla is more of an issue tracker than a request tracker, but it can be configured to handle email-based status tracking. That said, I think Steven has it- RT is the standard recommendation for this that I've seen.
The on-demand version of Fogbugz is a pretty cheap option for just a few people, and works really well. We did that for a while before moving it inhouse.
I've used fogbugz for over 12 months now and more and more I'm finding one of the most valuable features is the in built email support. I've got an on demand account and I'm finding more and more that I don't even check my email in the morning as all my business correspondence is put straight into fogbugz.
I realize that FOSS is your primary desire and I definitely agree with this. If I were to limit myself to FOSS, I would go with RT 3.8, http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#screenshots
However, if you are willing to entertain commercial solutions and are looking for a Helpdesk-"ish" application. I just deployed WebHelpDesk with great success at my current employment, where I am the primary sysadmin and Corporate IT person. They just released a new version, 9.1.1 and it is very well done. The email integration is superb and beyond what I have seen with most other FOSS and commercial issue/bug trackers, given that it is built to run a Helpdesk and not be a software or source code issue tracker. It runs on Windows and *nix, they have a great demo and you can obtain a 30 day trial installer. I have become a big fan of this software and think it has a reasonable price of $250/year/technician (support person).
If you want more info on how we deployed it, please email me and I'd be happy to discuss it at length. I have no more connection with them than I am a very happy customer.
Thanks for all the tips. For the moment, I am looking heavily at eTicket as it was trivial to setup and seems to be developing nicely at the moment. I may look at RT as well, though.
I'll second the suggestion for RT. See my post here for more thoughts and details on our setup.
From my personal experience I can recommend using Bridgetrak.
It works pretty smooth in our environment and includes rich helpdesk functionality for powerful tickets tracking.
I have a lot of experience using this tools - feel free to ask any questions!
As most of the answers are a little bit outdated, I would definitely recommend OsTicket (http://osticket.com/), a great open source project that offers lots of customization and a user friendly interface.
I have been using it for the last two years and I would rather choose OsTicket than OTRS or RT.