Thursday, January 21, 2010

New Project in the works

I have been at my new (old) job for a little over 3 months now, but that is more than enough time for me to see that there is A LOT that goes on every day. That platform that we primarily support is constantly having to be worked on due to bugs or issues that we find. Its like every week we are finding something else that is not right or is just plain wrong, or we are adding instances of an existing but, providing more proof of the bug itself.

Unfortunately, other than the notes that my team keeps in their spiral bound notebooks, we do not currently have any way to track the reports that we make and the bug tickets that get opened.

I have been researching the many (and I mean MANY) issue / bug tracking systems that are out there as a possible way for us to make entries and track each one, and also have the ability for our manager to run a report against it and get his own excel/csv spreadsheet for his weekly meetings.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any system that meets my exact needs. One of the most important requirements, being that I do not own the box where my site is hosted, is that it be wicked easy to install. It can require Perl modules or such, but I do not have root access and I have seen a few systems that require it.

The reporting piece is also an extremely important piece. Most of the systems that have reporting produce things like graphs and charts, but do not produce spreadsheets or csv files. The one that I did find is a Windows based system and I am working on Linux systems.

So, I am at the moment working on a full list of requirements and features that need to be implemented into this new system. This will certainly be one of the biggest projects I have ever worked on if it takes off as I expect. Of course, it will also be a lot of fun to boot.
 
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