Announcing Alpha Version of Issue Tracking in Acunote

Today we are introducing a preview of a new feature in Acunote - issue tracking. The functionality is not yet complete, but we making it available as an alpha release to get your impressions and suggestions as early as possible.

What is Issue Tracking in Acunote?

An issue in a bugtracker is a piece of work that needs to be resolved. Bug trackers let you capture all the artifacts related to this work, track and manage state transitions, query and analyze all past and future work. As an advanced project management tool, Acunote could do much of this already. It just lacked functionality to support issuetracker view onto the data that was already in the system.

Project management is about planning and tracking work. Within this world-view, it makes sense to treat sprints/iterations/project plans as a top-level object, and view individual units of work (tasks) within this context. Issue tracking views individual units of work (bugs/issues/tasks) as top-level objects, and lets you work with them with no regard for scheduling. Rather than relying on predetermined iterations for lists of issues, issue tracker lets you dynamically query for relevant subsets of issues.

No matter how you track it, the work that needs to be done does not change. You want to be able to keep track of everything associated with this work, as the issue tracker lets you, and you want to be able to schedule this work, as project management software lets you. Acunote now supports both approaches, with a no-compromises implementation on which we insist.

Much of the hard work was already done for multi-sprint tasks which made tasks into first class entities, and added explicit task numbers. Issue tracking now lets you treat these first class tasks as issues, query them, and create issues without having to assign them to sprints. The datamodel lets us keep the system remains DRY, with one task/issue for each unit of work. In addition task/issue details view has been enhanced, and supports all the operations previously only possible from the task list view in a sprint.

The system is notable for what it lacks -- restrictions and fuss. You can schedule an issue to one sprint, to multiple sprints or to no sprints at all. Each sprint can have it's own hierarchy, and you can evolve the hierarchies in agile fashion without losing past data. You can create issues/tasks from the project management side (nothing has changed there), and they will now also be accessible through issue tracking interface. You can create issues/tasks from the Issue page, and later assign them to sprints. You can update tasks/issue from sprint, issue list, and task/issue details page with a consistent interface.

A small note on terms. We use words "task" and "issue" interchangeably, e.g. "task 1234" means the same thing as "issue 1234", because they are the same thing. We tend to prefer "task" in the context of project management, and "issue" in the context of issue tracking.

What Functionality is New?

• new Issues tab
• issues list with pagination, in-place editing and keyboard shortcuts
• issues filtering with a custom search language
• task details page enhancements
• soft-deletion of issues

We added Issues tab which shows all tasks in Acunote as issues and provides the usual bugtracker-like management interface for them.

Creation and modification is the same good old in-place creation and modification you know from the task list. There's an interface to tag/untag issues, and a new interface to assign selected issues to sprints.

You can filter issues using a powerful search/filtering language. For example, to search for unresolved issues created by user Joe and owned by user Kate which have word "screenshot" somewhere in description you'd search for:

screenshot status: "Not Started" OR status: "In Progress" creator: Joe owner: Kate

If you ever used advanced search features of Google Search or Gmail you'll notice the similarity. It's essentially the same language extended with Acunote-specific operators. We added a search and filtering language help section describing this in detail. You'll find a link to the help section near the search box on Issues page.

As mentioned above, issue details view has been enhanced, and supports in-place issue editing, tag operations, sprint assignment operations previously only possible from the task list view in a sprint. This was a common enhancement request, and we are happy to deliver.

Future work

While immediately useful, the issue tracking functionality is still in "alpha." We advise not to rely on it for everyday use just yet. We kindly ask you to give it a try and tell us what you think. User feedback is essential to us, so we are making this available as early as possible to get it. We are continuing to extend issue tracking, and will be deploying new functionality as it becomes available.

Comments

[Jeremy]

Issue tracking really needs to be separate from sprint tasks to be really useful. I can see that in some situations issues get assigned to a sprint as a task, but often they don't, and often they are actually nothing to do with the programming side.

It would be a great thing to have in acunote, and I look forwards to seeing how it progresses. One huge issue would be that we often need to have clients access the issue tracking software to view and post bugs, but we don't those people necessarily accessing the sprint.

As a side note, we've yet to find really good issue tracking software, and seeing as acunote is so good at what it does (simple) I hope you can write a good issue tracker.

[Gleb Arshinov]

Jeremy: noted on separation. We'll need to have good way to separate categories of issues/tasks. Tags can do it now, but we may need to add more structured way. We'll see as it gets more use.

Restricted client access is also a somewhat common request. Noted.

[Darren]

I'd agree with Jeremy on the point of separation. Even with a bunch of us huddled round trying to figure a way we could use the Issue side of Acunote we struggled because you guys lump Issues and Tasks together.

More often an Issue would spawn one or more Tasks but wouldn't normally become a Task itself.

Another bugbear is the fact that all Tasks are listed as Issues - we can't see any use for this and actually think it's a nuisance.

One more thing (we do like Acunote - honestly) is the lack of filtering by tags on the Issues tab. The searching is all very well but it's old fashioned compared to the filter by tags...

[Alexander Dymo]

Darren: generally issue tracking is still in very early stage of development and we're now just like scientists looking for bozon in that collider :)

Yes, we will do filtering in Issues tab including tag filtering. That's just a matter of time.

But your question about Issues vs Tasks is more interesting. We're thinking about two models of how you could use current functionality in Acunote.

First model describes a simple case when your issue is atomic and simple. What you can do then is assign it to the sprint. Acunote creates the task which becomes the "representation" of the issue in some sprint.

Second model describes a more complex case when you have a complex issue which would require several tasks to be made to close the issue. Currently in Acunote you would assign issue to sprint (still creating the task for the issue), go to that sprint and create child tasks for it.

The pros of those models is that you always have information about the progress on Issue level - you know who works on that, how much time is spent and when you will finish.

The cons are exactly what you described. First, some tasks you create may not be issues (for example those child tasks for the complex issue). Second, it may not be desirable to see some tasks as issues (low-level operations and so on).

We're still thinking about all possible use cases and workflows to find the common denominator behind them. Maybe we'll need to reconsider relationship between task and issue, maybe we'll display only relevant issues on the issues tab. We've not decided on that yet.

[Darren]

Hi Alexander,

Thanks for the response - it's good to hear you're working on moving Issues out of Alpha...

Another matter with issue tracking is that your current list of statuses will most likely not suffice. While they work fine for tasks (although Verified threw us for a while), for Issues we'd be looking at more bug tracking type statuses i.e. Not Issue, Duplicate, Ready for Test etc and so on.

cheers, Darren