Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: A Customer's Self-Service Interface to Bug Tracker!?!

Hi,

Just a brief update about our current advances:

We've got the first version of self-service interface for bug-tracker running on our own intranet. It's basicly working as described in the initial posting. We'll release the GPLed code probably with ]po[ V3.3 (after V3.2).

However, we had to fork the OpenACS bug-tracker package because most pages required customization:

- Permissions are different: Permissions now depend on the underlying project, not on the APM-package.
- Integration in the ]po[ GUI
- Integration with the ]po[ timesheet package
- Integration with the ]po[ finance module

So I fear that this is another example how fine but notable differences between "collaboration" and "ERP" processes require quite a different application architecture.

pull in all of the tickets from all the subsites

]po[ doesn't support the concept of subsites, so we won't offer bug reports cutting 'cross subsites. Instead, we might actually convert "components" into fully-fledged OpenACS objects representing a software package. So a single bug-tracker is sufficient.

it would be nice if each user in a subsite were to be
able to view their own tickets, unless given permission
to view other users tickets in that group.

That's working.

Invoicing should be handled properly by an
accounting/reporting package.

Also working already. We even have a wizard to select invoicable hours and aggregate them into an invoice, multiplying them with prices pulled out of a per-customer price list based on "materials" (type of service).

reporting

We've got two main reports right now plus a pivot-table (data-warehouse light) for analysis of hours per customer, user, project and their respective DynFields (dynamic fields as of acs_attributes).

We've got even a module for business indicators (Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard) with the "diagram" package in our pipeline.

Cheers,
Frank