editors

[Karsten Wade]

On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 09:07, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 09:44, Dave Pawson wrote:
> > > You'll eventually get the hang of it; I think Bugzilla is important for
> > > tracking.
> > For tracking bugs, yes.
> > We aren't talking bugs?
> 
> Bugzilla is a decent tool for tracking TODO's and doing very simple
> project management. We are thinking of using it in-house for some
> development tasks as well.

It has a couple of useful project management features that a Wiki
doesn't have:

* Dependency tracking -- when working on a project, you have items which
depend on the completion of previous items.  For example, to build a
floor for you house, first you need to make a foundation.  In bugzilla,
the report for the floor would have several blocking bugs ("Bug XXXXXX
depends on" and then a list of bug numbers in the Additional Feature
Information section of a bugzilla report).  Those blocking bugs would be
things such as "dig foundation", "pour concrete", "lay under the floor
plumbing", "under the floor wiring", etc.  All of those would have to be
marked CLOSED for the bug report for the floor to be marked CLOSED.

Of course, the floor is just itself a dependency for the walls it
supports.  And they are dependencies for the roof.  All of those
dependencies all have individual dependencies similar to the floor.

A proper project management tool has lots of nice ways to do this with
some poor person in charge of manually updating it.  Bugzilla has grown
from a simple bug reporting tool to a little bit more than that; it
collects community project information, and lets people create
interdependencies to track open source software projects.

It works well for that, which is why we recommend adopting it for the
FDP.

* Automated features -- email to involved parties, which can even
include a mailing list setup as an account (kind of useful, kind of
annoying).  Cross dependency checking.

* Database backed -- a bug report can capture a huge amount of useful
information, making your one bug report part of a massive information
resource.  You can track time estimates and hours worked, keep track of
your tasks in one location, search and slice those tasks, etc.

On top of that, it's easier to do URLs now
(http://bugzilla.redhat.com/123456 will work), and it's searchable via
google (try: site:bugzilla.redhat.com some search terms).

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, Tech Writer
a lemon is just a melon in disguise
http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
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