RT and Projects

RT Users
1

We’ve been using RT pretty happily for keeping track of simple requests and
tasks, but lately I’ve been thinking about how best to track “projects”, by
which I mean something larger than the typical trouble-ticket item. A
project might have multiple developers working on it, go through various
stages of a lifecycle, and have a number of subtasks, for instance.

One could imagine using RT to track projects, since you could assign
keywords for lifecycle stages, use the parent-child relationships to track
subtasks, etc. But it seems like fairly extensive work would need to be
done to make it usable, for instance:
- a view showing only top-level tasks (those without a parent),
which are the projects
- the abilty to operate on a project and its subtasks as a unit
- ability to have multiple keywords as part of the queue listing
- multiple views of queue, with different columns
has anyone taken a path like this? It seems overly ambitious for me right
now.

Another tack would be to have a separate piece of software to track
projects, and maybe get some hooks in so that RT tasks can be "related to"
or “children of” projects. There are hundreds of project management
software titles available - any recommendations of ones that are similar in
spirit to RT? By that I mean something relatively simple (not trying to
redesign your enterprise for a million-dollar licensing fee), somewhat
customizable, and open in structure so that one could imagine integrating
them into an existing structure???

thanks for any ideas –

Bng

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2

Goldowsky, Boris wrote:

We’ve been using RT pretty happily for keeping track of simple requests and
tasks, but lately I’ve been thinking about how best to track “projects”, by
which I mean something larger than the typical trouble-ticket item. A
project might have multiple developers working on it, go through various
stages of a lifecycle, and have a number of subtasks, for instance.

If you have a budget, you might consider sponsoring Jesse’s
development of DTRT, which sounds pretty much like what you
want (and if you’re paying for it, it’ll probably end up
exactly what you want. :slight_smile:

3

lately I’ve been thinking about how best to track “projects”

We are also considering using ‘RT’ in such situations.

… fairly extensive work would need to be done to make it usable, for
instance:

There’s a number of things I’d been considering similar to what you
mention.

  • a view showing only top-level tasks (those without a parent),
    which are the projects

That’s just a customized version of the generic search page, and I’m not
expecting that to be too much work.

  • the abilty to operate on a project and its subtasks as a unit

The results of any search query can be iterated through with the
‘first’, ‘next’, ‘prev’ links and can be updated in bulk. So this is
done for you if you can generate a search result set that includes just
the children of a specified ticket.

While there isn’t a way of selecting like this currently[*0] using the
web interface, it can be done with the command-line interface. So the
mechanism for such selection is there and it can’t be that tricky to put
a web interface in front of it.

Then in the search results tickets with children can have links to
display all their child tickets (which are themselves suppressed from
the main display).

[*0] I’m still on 2.0.13, so my comments are subject to anything I’ve
said having changed in the latest version.

  • ability to have multiple keywords as part of the queue listing

That just involves customizing the search results page, possibly
separately for each queue.

  • multiple views of queue, with different columns

That’s doing the same as the above, but doing it differently many times
and giving them different URLs.

has anyone taken a path like this? It seems overly ambitious for me
right now.

I haven’t done much of any of the above yet. If you want to dive in,
I’d suggest customizing the data you get in search results is probably
the easiest of those to make a start on. Copy Search/Listing.html to
another name, then try changing things and see what happens.

Smylers
GBdirect