Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Lightweight issue tracking
If you’ve ever worked on a software project, you’ll know that bugs and issues stack up faster than you can work on them. This week’s tip, shared by cadetblue, describes a way to use email, Smart Lists, and sharing to quickly put together an issue tracker.
Issue / bug tracking is a must when running web or software business, but often a full fledged issue / bug tracking solution, like Bugzilla or Atlassian or ever Mantis BT could intimidate customers and collaborators, often featuring several levels of experience and skills; so a really lightweight solution able to put order in your activities and manage in a disciplined way the issues you must face (like it or not) could make the difference between a wishful thinking failure and an humble success. So, there is nothing really smart in what I made, but at least it is a working solution with a 45 seconds setup effort.
I set up the following tags: severity-feature, severity-trivial, severity-text, severity-layout, severity-minor, severity-major, severity-blocking.
Then I have defined the following Smart Lists:
tagContains:severity AND NOT status:completed
aptly renamed issuesOpen, then - guess what? - I have set up the following Smart List:
tagContains:severity AND status:completed
aptly renamed issuesClosed.
Lastly, as soon as I receive some issues reported by mail from a customer, I immediately forward it to my RTM import email address; then I add details about due date and I tag the activity according to the severity. The email body already contains the issue description, but I can edit it for clarity. Last, I share the activity with people in charge for the issue addressing. Then I start the issue monitoring by means of the Smart Lists. That’s all. It works.
Thanks for sharing this tip, cadetblue! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
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