Ask HN: How do you manage issues/bugs, track features Hi all, what process do you use to track issues, manage these and keep a list of the most requested features? I'm asking because there are millions of tools out there, all seem to be different versions of a to do list. Does anyone find it really unmotivating to track a list of ever expanding issues? How do you prioritise to stay focused on a few at a time. This adds more complexity when you want to launch new features at the same time. |
I'm the tech/coding part, whereas he has the domain knowledge, so we have a Workspace setup for the project, then have seperate projects within that - ie, at the moment we have a Front-End project, a Back-End project, a Phase 2 project and a Future project.
If it's a bug or something we want for launch it goes into Front or Back-End, for sometime after launch it's Phase 2 and a nice-to-have goes into Future - tasks get assigned to me when there's an action needed, once done I assign it back and once we're both happy then it's completed - we use the Comments to put notes down regarding ideas for how it should work/look etc. against the tasks.
One thing I like that Asana has recently got is sub-tasks, so you can break a task down into component tasks without cluttering your main Task list up.
Works for us, may not for anyone else though :)
We normally get together on Monday to sort these issues. Move urgent ones to the 'focus' list etc. But the main problem is that it's not very motivating to log issues and to solve them. It always looks like there are infinite amounts of work to do.
Say we want a new feature to handle processing a file and generating metadata from it after upload - in this case we'd have a high-level task of "Generate metadata asynchronously on upload" then within that I can have sub-tasks like "Create Resque job on upload", "Generate metadata in Resque job", "Update model with metadata", "Mail user on completion" - this way the main task list isn't cluttered with too much detail, and when I'm in the actual task the list of things to concentrate on are fairly small (I like to break a task up into 5 or so discrete parts which seems about right to me)
Another great tool to use is Jing or Snagit to take a screenshot or short video of the bug, in action. Then it's a simple click to upload to Screencast and paste the unique URL for the screenshot into the bug. Much faster than taking screenshot, naming image, saving it, and attaching it.
It has a roadmap feature where you define milestones, and you can assign tickets to a milestone for planning and triage.
One thing I haven't figured out is how to block closing a ticket on the closing of another ticket. That's all I'm missing from it so far. Anyone? Is there a feature or plugin for that, or a practice, that I've missed?
Edit: s/to a roadmap/to a milestone/
It includes - user time tracking, bug reporting, you can create Epic issues and add sub-tasks under them. All very useful.
You can also get FishEye to integrate SVN info.
Including all the sub tasks sounds great, means each time you complete a small task there is a sense of achievement. I'll try it out! Thanks!