Tracker

The beta version of SourceForge's new tracker tool is designed to allow for flexibility in how you track items of work that need to be completed. You can even install multiple tracker's for different purposes, for example a large project could have trackers for the design team, the documentation team, the developers, and another for support.

Each of these trackers could have their own unique list of tickets, as well as custom fields, custom milestones, and their own "mailing list."

Features:

The feature set of the tracker is designed around the fundamental belief that a ticket is a set of data about what needs to be done -- but also that it's a way to structure conversations about what to do and how to do that work.

• integrated comments/mailing list
• integrated Markdown style markup support
• custom fields
• rich search syntax
• saved searches
• mass edit
• individual and tracker wide e-mail subscriptions
• tagging

Integrated Comments and e-mail subscriptions

One of the fundamental features of the tracker is that every ticket is it's own mini-mailing list. Ultimately this idea comes from another bug tracker roundup which called the idea nosy lists. The idea is that everybody who edits or comments on a ticket is added to a mailing list (along with anybody who subscribes to that ticket). That mailing list is integrated in to the in-page comments for that ticket, and makes it easy to keep up on the tickets in various trackers that interest you.

If you have your e-mail address setup in your sourceforge account, you'll automatically be subscribed to any ticket you edit.

You can also click the subscribe link (e-mail icon) on any ticket page to subscribe/unsubscribe from any ticket's mailing list.

If you'd like to subscribe to every change/every comment on the whole tracker there's another subscribe link right at the top of the mail tracker page.

Integrated Markdown style markup support

Like the Wiki, the Discussion, and all of the other new forge tools, you can use markdown syntax to create rich formatting of your ticket text, or comments on tickets.

Custom fields

If you are an admin on a project you can add and delete custom fields for your tracker. Custom fields can be used to track everything from a list of components, to the relative size of the ticket, the QA person responsible for the ticket, or (hopefully) anything you can imagine.

You can edit the Custom Fields for the tracker under the ADMIN tab for your project.

In the left hand nav bar there will be a section for your tracker, based on whatever name you gave it when it was installed.

In my case it's Tickets, and within that will be all of the configuration options for that tracker tool. Custom Fields, Status options, and Milestone drop down options call all be edited under Field Management.

You can add text, numeric, and multi-select fields. These are all pretty self explanatory, except for multi-select fields, which pop open a new options text box. To add new options just add spaces to separate the items, and arrange them the way you'd like them to appear on the drop-down.

Rich search syntax

You can do full text searches for tickets at any time, but sometimes you want a bit more. You want to be able to filter results by milestone, or by who's working on the ticket, or by status, or some combination of the above.

We're plan to write a more full featured search query interface, but for now you can write your own searches using Lucene style syntax.

So for example

assigned_to_s:mramm && !(status:closed)

would help you to find all the tickets assgined_to mramm that are closed. We intend to clean this up eventually, but right now, you need to know that assigned_to is a string, so the _s marker is automatically added to the field name by solr.

Saved searches

If you have a search that you want all users of the tracker to be able to share, you can save that search with a name, and it will be placed in the left nav bar of the tracker for everybody to use. Common saved searches are all open tickets, all unassigned tickets, etc. You can use these saved searches to watch the flow of tickets through the system.

Mass edit

To edit a group of tickets all at once, just start with any search that returns the tickets you want -- and then click the Edit All button at the bottom of that page. You will then be shown a list of all the matching tickets, you can select the ones you want, and then enter the new value for the ticket in the form provided at the very bottom of the page.