Bugtracker - agregation and automated workflow

Question

Intro:

I'm working for a contractor company. We're making SW for different corporate clients, each with their own rules, SW standards etc.

Problem:

The result is, that we are using several bug-tracking systems. The amount of tickets flow is relatively big and the SLA are deadly sometimes. The main problem is, that we are keeping track of these tickets in our own BT (currently Mantis) but we're also communicating with clients in theirs BT. But as it is, two many channels of communication are making too much information noise.

Solution, progress:

Actual solution is an employee having responsibility for synchronizing the streams and keeping track of the SLA and many other things. It's consuming quite a large part of his time (cca 70%) that can be spend on something more valuable. The other thing is, that he is not fast enough and sometimes the sync is not really synced. Some parts of the comments are left only on one system, some are lost completely. (And don't start me at holidays or sickness, that's where the fun begins)

Question:

How to automate this process: aggregating tasks, watching SLA, notifying the right people etc. partially or all together?

Thank you, for your answers.

Formerly

Answer 1

You need something like Zapier. It can map different applications and synchronize data between them. It works simply:

1. You create zap (for example between redmine and teamwork).
2. You configure mapping (how items/attributes in redmine maps to items/attributes in teamwork)
3. You generate access tokens in both systems and write them to zap.
4. Zapier makes regular synchronization between redmine and teamwork.

But mantis is not yet supported by Zapier. If all/most of your clients BT are in Zapier's apps list, you may move your own BT to another platform or make a request to Zapier for mantis support.

Another way is develop your own synchronization service that will connect to all client's BTs as each employee using login/password/token and download updates to your own BT. It is hard way and this solution requires continious development to support actual virsions of client's BTs.

Ryanryann

Answer 2

You can have a look a Slack : https://slack.com/

It's a great tools for group conversations

Talk, share, and make decisions in open channels across your team, in private groups for sensitive matters, or use direct messages one-to-one.

you can have a lot of integrations tools, and you can use Zapier https://zapier.com/ with it to programm triggers.

With differents channels you can notifying the right people partially or all together in group conversation :)

Sunfish

Answer 3

The obvious answer is to create integrations between all of the various BT's. Without knowing what those are, it's hard to say if that's entirely possible. Most modern BTs have an API and support integrations. Some, especially more desktop based ones, don't. For those you probably have to monitor a database directly.

Zapier, as someone already suggested, is a great tool for creating integrations and may already have some of the ones yo need available. I love Slack and it has an API, but messages are basically just text and unless you want to do some kind of delimiting when you post messages to its API, it probably isn't going to work.

I'm not sure what budget is, but it will cost resources to create the integrations. I'd suggest that you hire someone to simply manage these. Someone who's sole responsibility is to cross-populate the internal and the external bug tracking system and track the progress in each. All you really need is someone with good attention to detail for this, they don't have to be a developer. This should be more cost effective than using developer resources on this.

The other alternative is simply to stop. If your requirements dictate that you use your clients' bug tracking software for projects you do for them, just use their software and stop duplicating the effort. If you need some kind of central repository or something for managing work maybe just a simple table somewhere or spreadsheet with the client, the project, the issue number, the status and if possible a link to the issue in the client's BT. I understand the need and desire for centralizing this, but if it's stifling productivity, then the opportunity costs are too high IMO.

If you create an integration tool foe this, you will indeed have a very viable product. This is actually a pretty common problem.

Varicocele