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Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

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101–110 of 128 posts

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#101
I’ve always wanted something with a unified tag,list,tree,status approach. In one view I might want to represent an issue status as a kanban. In another the same status is an icon, color, size, checkbox, progress bar or what have you.

F.ex let’s say I want to do a quick t-shirt sizing of a large set of issues. A quick way to do that in a workshop is a mute mapping into size bins.

Also quick an free hierarchies are important. Workflowy style outlining, perhaps again with some additional labeling assistance depending on nesting level. F.ex if you want to structure things with impact mapping or story mapping and the whole ATDD thing.

If I’m completely free to dream I’d much rather work with real pens, papers and walls though. So the dream is to simply fix the annoying physical limitations of that. Can I have unlimited, indexed wall space please? Also make it easy to rearrange groups of cards.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#102

Shameless plug: I'm building an issue tracker integrated in your git repository, decentralized, fully working offline and from your terminal/web browser. If you want to join the fun, feel free :-) https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

How are you doing offline on browser?

Yes. `git bug webui` will start a local web server to serve a js app and a GraphQL API as a backend.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#103
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> modeled around freetext documents Are "freetext documents" a specific thing here?

No, just unstructured text. The idea is to start out with prose to encourage creative thought (as opposed to robotically clicking at a form) and then enrich it with more structured data later.

Ah, gotcha. I’ve seen a system like that at my doctor’s office, it always seems really clever. You just type whatever in, and if it means something, the system will link it up or help you complete the value or whatever. That would be much better than Jira’s strict fields.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#104
The main problem with issue trackers is they treat everything the same way (bug/issue, task, goal, project, milestone, team, etc.). Where they break out of the one size fits all mold their abstractions generally start to break down and using them requires mental hoop jumping and too many clicks.

Key feature: Disparate views. View as self. View as department. View as project. View as team. View as team member. All views should work across an arbitrary number of repos.

As a manager I frequently have to context switch like this and I want to see three things: what's being worked on, what has changed, and where we are headed. For the latter, a clear distinction between abstract/relative prioritization between tasks and a timeline view (GANTT or critical path or inter-project/inter-issue relations) would be good.

The ability to summarize what's gone on today/this week (visually), eg. send me roughly what each team member achieved, status of their goals, what is blocking them, and what they're refocused on, where the time and money went. Critical when I am out of the office and don't want to spend time re-interpreting git commits across 10s of repos.

Basically keep the need for human effort out of the loop wherever possible - remove the reporting cycle, just use git history, any other system history (wiki, issues, etc.) and auto-compile a comprehensive view.

The fact that github only recently added beta org dashboards and they still have a long way to come shows there is demand here. However, you are effectively racing against github.

Also, we do hardware so ordering or acquiring parts is a huge issue that affects speed of iteration. I would want connectivity to accounting, purchase order, order tracking and inventory management systems. The key feature there is order status transparency, largely driven by third party platform order identification and subsequent logistics provider tracking number lookup integration for realistic ETA.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#105
Moved away from Jira to GitLab and it is almost perfect.

Some features are missing, but I hope the GitLab team will add sooner or later.

In Jira, there was too much customisation which made it difficult to configure properly and as many times I tried to come up with perfect workflow, I have failed to do.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#106
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One trouble with JIRA is that it doesn't come opinionated, this often means that if one team starts tweaking it, another team gets presented with 30 fields and no idea what to do with them all. Or you get one location who try to use it while simulataneously another location might use it in a completely different way, and then it becomes even harder to really keep a grip on what's going on. You also get fights over wh…

This is a JIRA management failure - why is the same workflow being imposed on different teams? Either the company has agreed that all teams will follow the same workflow, then you do as described above, or each team owns their own workflow definitions.

>each team owns their own workflow definitions

JIRA actively makes this hard. To modify a workflow a user has to be a Global JIRA Administrator.

The whole design of JIRA is based around management. It's not really for developers, as much at is is for your boss. This explains why Atlassian can get away with the user experience being so bad - it doesn't matter because developers aren't the ones choosing it.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#107
Two things I always want, which I'm amazed aren't commonplace yet:

1. One of the fundamental operations, for all of software development, is taking a big task and dividing it into smaller tasks. The smaller tasks should inherit the relevant fields (e.g., assignee, and target milestone) from the original one, and the original issue should aggregate the relevant fields (e.g., sum the time estimates, and let me see one mega-diff of all the constituent changesets) of all of its sub-issues. Of course, sub-issues in turn need to be able to be broken down further.

Most bug trackers are able to create dependencies between issues, so it's possible to create such a thing out of a dependency tree, but I've never used a system that made it easy.

2. It should be Git-based. The state of the issue tracker is just data, and I should be able to work on that without a special web-only interface that requires me to be online (though it should still have a web UI). I want to use my own tools -- I would have saved a ton of time over the years if I could have just grepped the whole issue database for what I was looking for. This would also make it easy to write programs to operate on the issue data -- I don't want to learn your issue tracker's special API. Or do the same thing to 20 issues by having to click 200 times.

On GitHub, everything is a repo (source code, project wikis) except the issue tracker. So close! It's almost like they were intentionally trying to make this one type of data difficult to work with.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#108
Git with:

    // [tag]: for inline issues and 
    .issue/issues/issue-slug-name.{md,adoc,rst,etc}, 
    .issue/tags/tag/issue-slug-name -> ../../issues/issue- 
    slug-name
    .issue/tags/tag/file#lineno -> 
    ../../../some/tree/file/with/tag
For something advanced I would want a language like Gherkin but for bugs so users/developers could easily show the issue given some sort of state in a declarative language

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#109
To me, it would look a lot like Basecamp with tickets.

You'd open a thread like a typical nested message board-- say "Red Widgets Project -> 2019 release 2 -> [Maintenance Team] Support Blue Widgets". There would be a series of posts, probably the first one being "We need blue widget support for customer xyz". At the bottom of the post would be links to one or more tickets for the described task. Then there'd be followup messages, discussing the feasibility of blue widgets, clarifying what blue widgets need different, or noting things they discovered in the process. Maybe late in the process, they add other tickets for "fix blue widgets turning yelliw" or "prevent SQL injection on the blueness value", and each one appears at the bottom of the message that spawned it.

The tickets can have individual lifecycles, but the discussion threads would move back and forth based on activity like message boards do. Importantly, they remain both browsable and searchable, even if you have to click through a bunch of pagination. Maybe the threads can be flagged as "task complete" or other statuses to improve searchability.

The discussion that goes around a ticket-- how to reproduce, the decision making process, context associated with the issue-- has long term value. In a ticket-centric system, this all gets attached to the ticket, which disappears into the void when it's marked complete. This model leaves i intact, and treats the tickets as decoration.

Re: Ask HN: What would your ideal issue tracker look like?

#110
post #98

We use one system for triage, others for tracking. Support phone, email and social drop in there, mostly closed right away, others then route to the proper system GitHub Issue, Trello, etc. Triage was our biggest pain point. And i wish for a system that forced WIP limits and only one P1

You make a good point about the need for triage. One of the things that In or just setup at work, all bugs get the bug label and a severity, even if someone just saw something odd and we're not even sure if it's a bug. Since everything goes on the same pile, you end up with a lot of junk mixed with the important stuff
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