/ticket system

part of the ArsDigita Community System by Tracy Adams, Henry Minsky, Jeff Davis

The big picture

Software occasionally has bugs. The ticket system is designed to to record and track tasks, bugs, and feature requests. The intent is to have clearly defined responsibilities for tickets in every state and to have auto-notification capabilities which ensure that no ticket slips through the cracks.

The medium picture

The new version is much more configurable and intended to support centralized tracking of multiple projects. Also, there are a number of new features to facilitate recording higher quality data on web development projects in particular. There is an interface into the ticket tracker which allows creating a link on each page for submitting a ticket which will record the user-agent, originating URL, and originating query.

Additionally, there are two ticket entry modes: "feedback," which hides all the complexity of the ticket tracker, and "full," which allows all fields to be set. Feedback mode is suitable for a feedback link in the footer of user oriented pages (and will also record user-agent and other data).

To see the feedback entry mode and the enhanced information tracking visit the "Feedback" link in the top right of the Administration screen.

User Model

Project and Feature areas are owned by groups. Tickets can only be assigned to users who are members of the owning group of the Feature Area. Tickets can be private to projects or to Feature Areas (depending on whether the "Public" flag is set) and will only be visible if the user is a member of either the owning group of the project or feature area. This restriction may also be applied on a per ticket basis.

Ticket Administration is carried out by members of the group Ticket Admin Staff, whose responsibilities include creating new projects and feature areas, project permissioning, and default ticket assignments per project/feature area. Adding a user to the Ticket Admin Staff group (group type Administration) gives the user full access to all tickets and ticket system administration capabilities.

Creating a Project

Note that you can also create a project as a "copy" of another project. This is useful since you can create a "template project" with a set of feature areas such as System Administration, Admin, Automated testing reports, documentation, etc. preassigned.

You can also create a feature area and assign it to all the same projects as a pre-existing feature area.

New features in 3.1

User visible: Administrative: Non user-visible:

Missing features of the old version

Some features of the original ticket tracker are currently broken or missing:

Things to come


teadams@arsdigita.com, hqm@arsdigita.com davis@arsdigita.com