Tracking project issues

Project help for project owner administration: Index

Project owner administration
  Editing and maintaining the Project Home page
  Managing project site news
  Managing project files
  Adding project members and approving roles
  Configuring and managing project mailing lists `
  Managing project documentation
  Managing project source code
  You are here: Tracking project issues
  - About administrative issue tracking permissions
  - Configuring IssueZilla's administrative options
  - Tips and tricks for issue management
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Issue tracker tool documentation

Project Issues page help
Entering and modifying issues
Querying and tracking issues
Generating status reports about project issues

Issue tracking administration

Because you are a Project Owner, you automatically have administrative permissions in IssueZilla to manage and track your project's issues. You can access these administrative options two different ways:

- Your view of the Project Issues page includes additional sections to Edit Users, Edit Groups, and Edit Components.

- All administrative options are included in the Issue Tracking toolbar, which appears in your view of all issue tracking screens.

Your role of Project Owner gives you the ability to configure almost every element of IssueZilla. Descriptions of these options and their default settings follows. Probably the most significant permission you have is the ability to edit the issue tracking permissions of all other users on your project. This can include delegating some of these administrative permissions to other users to help manage and plan the project workload.

If one of your project members builds a solid track record of committing issues that get confirmed, this is probably a person who understands the project and the issue tracking system well enough to be granted the "Can confirm an issue" permission. As a project owner, you can and should use IssueZilla to track this kind of information about project participants to help you manage project issues effectively.

To learn how to assign issue tracking permissions to project members, see "Users" in the next section

Configuring IssueZilla's administrative options

Prefs (Preferences)
  Lets you configure some aspects of your issue tracking functionality and display environment, including:

  - Email settings for automatic issue email notifications to you.
  - Page footer links to be included in your query results screens.
  - Permissions assigned to you as the default issue tracking administrator. (You control these permissions for all members of your project through the Users option in the Issue Tracking toolbar.)

Sanity check
  An automated process that checks for an identifies any anomalies in your project's issues database, such as conflicting dependencies, committed issue errors, and correct references between issue reporters and user profiles.

Users
  A text string field lets you access the user edit screen either by filtering for specific users or leaving it blank to access the full list of users after clicking the "Submit" button. Clicking on listed user's link displays another edit screen where you can check and uncheck permissions options.

Components
  A component selection screen that lets you create, define, edit, add, and delete project components and subcomponents. Clicking on a component link in the list displays another edit screen where you can configure that particular component or subcomponent.

Groups
  A group selection screen that lets you create, define, and delete groups specifically for issue tracking purposes, and assign project member users to groups. You can make changes to one, several, or all fields and submit them all at once. Your project also includes a default set of groups pertaining to issue tracking permissions.

Keywords
  A keyword selection screen that lets you create, define, edit, and delete regular expression keywords to be used for issue tracking groups and queries.

Tips and tricks for issue management

IssueZilla is a powerful tool for managing and tracking your project's development activities down to the fine-grained details. As with most tools, users develop inevitably develop shortcuts and tricks to compensate for particular aspects of the tool, or to tailor it to their specific needs. IssueZilla is no exception.

What follows is a sampling of several tricks that have proved particularly useful to project managers or users with administrative issue tracking permissions:

- Avoid configuring the same management-level queries repeatedly by creating permanently displayed links to information you use constantly. For example, you can create a page of links for each project member's issue list, and for regularly used milestone or issue status queries.

- Because issues may not be deleted, you can create components or subcomponents named "issue graveyard" or "unknown" to collect dead or no longer applicable issues. IssueZilla's non-delete feature is actually a protective design feature since the ability to track such dead issues can sometimes come in handy, or at least preserve aspects of project history.

- Create a "not determined" milestone for project issues not yet tied to any particular project milestone date or release. Development project objectives and priorities tend to shift dynamically. This lets you identify and hold in reserve those issues affected by your project's evolution.

- Add a pseudo user known as "placeholder" (or some other equally obvious generic identity) who can "own" issues that you are not yet ready or able to assign to specific project members.

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