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Bug Tracking
Coordinating workflow in any development project, including software and hardware development projects, involves quite a bit more than just logging bugs (or more generally, incidents) into a database. In addition to incidents, you need to track a variety of project-related issues and activities, such as feature requests, meetings, e-mails, sign-offs by quality assurance engineers or customers, change notices, etc. And beyond simply tracking bugs and monitoring progress, you want to be able to link issues that are connected, e.g. to document that one particular incident blocks the resolution of several other issues.
In terms of the tracking process itself, you need to replace manual processes with workflow automation so that bugs are automatically managed through their life cycle (see also Life Cycle of an Incident for a detailed discussion):
openCRX automates the recording, tracking, and monitoring of software and hardware development bugs and other project-related incidents and activities. A powerful concept to group and structure all your project-related activities (see Activity Tracker), highly flexible workflows supporting the many possible transitions between states in the Life Cycle of an Incident), advanced time-tracking based on Work Records and meaningful real-time Reports aggregating information at several levels enable you to effectively manage your development project.
With openCRX, you produce higher-quality deliverables faster, reduce project costs, and improve customer satisfaction. openCRX connects everybody and provides a vital communications link - not only between members of your team, but between you and your customers.
To get started with bug tracking, create a new Activity Tracker by clicking on Activity Management > Activity Trackers > Activity Tracker. Give your tracker a name, add a description (optionally, you can also provide additional information like estimated effort, a welcome text, etc.) and then click the button [Save]:
If you want to restrict access to your tracker to a particular group of openCRX users, you (or your segment administrator, if you do not have sufficient privileges) should consider creating a user group for that purpose (e.g. User Group Tracker A) and add the appropriate openCRX users to that user group (openCRX security is explained in detail in the openCRX Security Guide). Next you should add the user group you created for this tracker to the list of owning groups. Click on the grid tab [^] and use the lookup inspector to add the appropriate user group (e.g. User Group Tracker A). Then you remove all other owning groups from your tracker by dragging their icons to the add/remove box followed by a click on the button [-] so that only the user group for this tracker is left in the list of owning groups as shown in the figure below:
The last security measure you should take is to edit the newly created tracker and change access levels for Browse, Update, and Delete to [2] Basic (these settings can be found in the tab [System]) to prevent users not belonging to the appropriate user group from tampering with your tracker.
Verify the security settings once again:
Owning User (tab [System]): you (or another project manager) should be owning user of your Activity Tracker
Browse access level (tab [System]) should be set to [2] Basic
Update access level (tab [System]) should be set to [2] Basic
Delete access level (tab [System]) should be set to [2] Basic
Owning Groups (Grid tab [^]): the user group created for your Activity Tracker should be the only owning group
If the security settings of your Activity Tracker are correct, the operation New Activity will create activities with the appropriate security settings so that only you and members of the owning group have access to the tracker and the linked activities.
Additional information about openCRX security is available in the chapter Security (or in the openCRX Security Guide, if you really want to dive into the technical details of role-based security).
Now it is time to add participants to your Activity Tracker. With the menu New > Tracker Participant you can bring up the form that allows you to add a Participant:
Enter the name of the participant (e.g. the participant's nick name or handle) and a short description, then use the Lookup Inspector to select an openCRX contact and pick an appropriate role (additional information about these attributes is available in the section Participant). Click the button [Save] to add this participant to the tracker:
If you later add additional participants, do not forget to also add the corresponding contacts to the appropriate user group.
Removing a contact from the list of participants of a particular tracker does not revoke privileges associated with the corresponding contact being member of the user group associated with this tracker! To revoke security privileges you must remove the contact from the relevant user group(s). Please refer to the openCRX Security Guide for detailed information regarding openCRX security.
Now you can add new activities to this tracker by using the operation Actions > New Activity.
Choose the activity type Incident to report a new bug (see Activity Types for more information - the operation New Activity is explained in detail in the section New Activity (Incident)):
The result of the operation New Activity returns links that enable you to conveniently navigate to the newly created incident or continue with editing (see Activity for details on additional information you can provide). Submitting bugs (i.e. adding incidents) to a tracker initiates the Life Cycle of an Incident. Please refer to the section Incident Management for a detailed discussion of all the relevant topics that apply to incident management in general and bug tracking in particular.
You can use openCRX as a pretty lightweight bug tracking system for small teams (or even an individual developer), but openCRX also features tools to support very large and distributed projects with thousands of participants. You might want to read up on some of the supported concepts to make the most of using openCRX:
The following figures shows some of the possibilities available for filtering and/or sorting:
Let us look at some examples:
Sort Activities by Scheduled Start
Move your mouse over the sort button to the left of the text Scheduled start in the grid Activities and click it. openCRX will present all the activities sorted (ascending) by Scheduled start. If you want to narrow down your view to a particular day, click that day in the calendar below the navigation menu (this will copy the respective date to the search box - alternatively you can manually enter the date) and then click the text Scheduled start to filter for that particular date.
Sort Activities by Priority (descending)
Use the appropriate predefined filter to have openCRX sort all your open activities (open is equivalent to the value of %-complete not being 100) by descending priority; activities of equal priority are sorted by ascending due date.
Sort Activities by Due Date/Time (ascending)
Use the appropriate predefined filter to have openCRX sort all your open activities (open is equivalent to the value of %-complete not being 100) by ascending due date/time; activities with identical due date/time are sorted by descending priority.
openCRX offers many different views on the all the data related to an Activity Tracker. For example, a participant can view a list of all the activities of a particular tracker that are assigned to her with a single click (to see all activities assigned to you - regardless of assigned tracker - navigate to your User Home). If the tracker manager created categories and milestones to add even more structure to the project (see Category and Milestone for more information), you can also view lists of activities assigned to particular categories or milestones.
In addition to these powerful filtering views, openCRX also features various real-time reports. One of the predefined charts shows you a status overview of all incidents assigned to a tracker:
See section Reports for more information on reporting.
