- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
Well it's still the same amount of effort/wasted time/overhead. It's just that it's on paper instead of the computer.
Admin
Using a tracking tool to track every task does seem a bit pointless. A bug tracking tool is essential as a go-between for QA and development, however, for pure development tasks, it just seems unneccessary overhead. That's why those tasks are in the project plan!
Admin
Fist. Awesome! But they should have put it on a wooden table
Admin
He must have been upset that he couldn't draw pictures in JIRA.
Admin
Ho ho! I have felt this way many times (in fact I have a Jira tab open in Firefox next to this one!).
But the real WTF is that he's got outer space at only 24 miles altitude.
Admin
That's adorable. Sounds like this designer has an interesting sense of humor. I particularly like the Atlassian logo. :)
Admin
Can anyone recommend any free bug tracking software? Using Excel to track bugs is a pain.
Admin
hmm, his first name was Paul... Has (had in my case) a dislike for Jira. If 'paul' used Index cards, I really am wondering if I'm the subject of this... except I was the team lead and forced index cards on everyone else :)
** Why: The team, Project manager, developers, testers were all in the same room, we had several large whiteboards... we went 'manual' with index cards for tasks, a section stuck up for 'to do', and names with cards underneath in another section of the board.
Managment hated this, as they couldn't 'see' what was going on.. despite the fact that all they had to do was open our door and look at the wall instead of hitting a url. Or just wait till the weekly managment update meeting or status report email to be sent out.
Everyone else liked it... even the project manager ditched his Gant chart.
Admin
lol...
Admin
Admin
Yes, but how is the project manager supposed to know the tasks are finished? Is the person really going to want to get emails every time a task is finished? Proper tracking lets project managers know how long tasks are taking and compare the real values to the estimates. Of course, it can be a pain, depending on the tools and how much information you have to update every time. And if you're using the tracking tools properly, you shouldn't have to come up with status reports all the time since the built in reporting tools should give project managers the information they need.
Admin
We're using Mantis (http://www.mantisbt.org/) and it does its job pretty well.
Admin
Well you could take a page from Agile development and have daily stand ups (or maybe only have them 3 times a week). In my experience, stand ups work pretty well unless you have a moron in the group who forgets everything the minute you tell him and insists on rehashing previous meetings during the stand ups.
Yes, I worked with such a moron.
Stand ups are just status updates and can go smoothly otherwise.
Admin
You still need some way to track "Has X been done?" and to quickly look up what things still need to be done.
Admin
L.M.A.O.
awesome!
Admin
What... no wooden table? We've been cheated.
I always thought outer space was eight miles high. Granted, I may have been unduly influenced by McGwuinn, Crosby, et al.
Admin
Mantis and Trac are often used (although Trac is annoying to set up). I've been playing with Mingle ( http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence ) recently, and have so far fallen in love with it. It's free for up to 5 users, and for academic or open-source use.
Admin
Anyone else feeling strangely reminded of a certain Futurama episode? You sure this guy is called "Paul", not "Bender"? :)
Admin
haha, i had a similar manual ClearQuest at my last job. A tester came to the meeting with some bugs that had just found jotted on a sheet of paper. They brought them up in the meeting, noted that the bug wasn't in CQ yet, but asked my boss to assign somebody to it anyhow because it was urgent.
She took the paper out of the guy's hand and wrote: "State: Assessing. Owner: vt_mruhlin and handed it to me." I think the reason she gave it to me was because she expected me to lose it, thus stressing the need for the tool. But I was bored in the meeting, so I sat there and read their description, wrote my assessment and time estimates, submitted my changes to the change review board (a.k.a. passed the sheet across the table and got somebody from the CCB to sign it). CCB then passed it back to my boss to allocate to developers. She passed it back to me.
We were all having a good laugh going through the process manually, but once I asked the one guy with a laptop to print out some code for me so I could hand-write in my fixes, somebody decided we should actually get back on track with the meeting.
Admin
I am a software tester by profession, and where I work we have a separation. Developers develop (and do simple testing to make sure that the stuff they produce actually works), and the testers do the deeper testing (including chain testing, system testing, integration testing, quality assurance, and checking whether the build applications measure up to described behaviour, the requirements and the business rules).
We do the findings (the bugs as you call them), and the developers solve them.
But I agree, JIRA is a steaming pile of manure. :) (but the Access-based tool we are using at the moment is also slow)
Admin
Admin
Well, look at it this way. If the rocks used to build the pyramid are sufficiently dense, the pyramid will have sufficient gravitational pull to make a "dip" in the atmosphere near the pyramid, thus ensuring that the tip of the pyramid is at the exact spot where the atmosphere ends (at 24 miles).
Admin
Set up a webcam
Admin
Egyptians had JIRA (on papyrus), that's why they could build such great buildings. That is how they did it :
Admin
Admin
I guess he's reffering to the outer "spec" as in specification ;)
MUST ... STOP ... WORKING ... ON ... FUNCTIONAL ... SPECS ... FOR ... TODAY
Admin
We use JIRA where I work and some people occasionally get carried away. One guy was in charge of a small (non-coding) group. As he doled out the tasks to his minions he would put them all into JIRA. Great! he didn't have to speak to them or send them an email as JIRA would do this on submission of the new task. Of course, JIRA send emails for new issues/tasks, edits of tasks, comments or about anything else. So this meant that the team became buried under automated emails. Even so this didn't stop them even adding JIRA tasks for things that had already been done. (Add new task, then resolve!)
This probably would have been all right if it had not been for one "issue" that was added. [paraphrased] "could everyone make sure that they use JIRA for all tasks and close them off?"
not sure if this one was ever closed.
Admin
?????
Profit!
Admin
Stargate!
(The WTF is definitely 24 miles as the distance to space. Someone should submit a bug rep- oh.)
Admin
http://www.bugzilla.org/
Admin
It looks like Sameera (or whatever the first name in Subtasks is, the handwriting is kind of difficult to read) must be the senior developer on this project, as he has the best job. I mean, sure, he has to toil endlessly, but he's also the only one that has the opportunity, nay, the OBLIGATION, to get laid.
Admin
Well, at least Luke gets to sub for Paul while he rests.
Admin
They use it on Skullcrusher Mountain, too:
Admin
When I was the only developer on a team of Sys Admins, I wrote a small tool to track my releases, updates, and bugs. One day my manager spotted it over my shoulder and decided it was the be-all end-all tool to manage everyone's workloads.
He forced me to send the link to him (I "forgot" several times when he requested it). He started adding a bunch of junk data to play around with it then started asking me questions like "How do I specify what server has the issue?" and "How do I specify what customer or project the sent the issue to us?".
Fast forward 6 nightmarish years and my (glorified Excel spreadsheet) bug tracker now has all the workflow/trouble ticket, hardware inventory, software inventory, network data, and financial data for all the development hosting at a massive corporation shoehorned into it. I was finally rescued when they decided the system had reached steady state and outsourced it to Egypt. They ported it from PHP to VB.Net and now it is incredibly slow and doesn't really work. Glad I got out of there.
Admin
That's why we have status meetings, also gives a chance to raise issues directly, instead of entering them into some tool where it goes unnoticed. This way, one can also stress the urgency of certain issues.
Admin
I've used Lotus Notes as a bug tracking system before. Now, in theory it was actually a pretty cool system, but I guess in theory Lotus Notes is actually good also (and in theory communism works). There is some value to integrating bug tracking into your calendar/e-mail/sales/marketing. Imagine having task due dates showing up next to your meetings in your calendar, or being able to e-mail a list of links of outstanding issues to other people. We even had it integrated into our build system: creating a new build would do a lookup on all issues that were supposedly resolved for that release and compile a report/readme.txt file. Pretty cool stuff, I think.
Except for the fact that the issue-tracking calendar was completely separate from the normal meeting calendar. And the part where it (used to) e-mail all clients when a new build was made (wtf?). And the part where tickets could become locked forever so you'd have to put in a duplicate issue. And the fact that the search mechanism sucked so QA/Support guys would put in about 500 copies of the same issue. And the fact that it ran on LOTUS FUCKING NOTES so it was slow as hell and almost unusable.
Other than that it was sweet, though.
Admin
At my work our tracker has 3 priorities (Low, Normal and High). Most people respects them and uses them wisely.
But one person refuses to use anything lower than Normal. In fact, most of his entries are High. We have tried to talk to him, but he refuses since his entries are always "important". We have given up on him, and mentally reduces the level by one :-)
The funny part is that occasionally he sends something that really deserves the "High" status. And since they will seem like any other entry, he has to use ALL CAPS IN THE TITLE with several exclamation marks and the words "IMPORTANT" and "ASAP".
Admin
If it were sufficiently dense to do that, wouldn't it just sort of sink through the earth's crust? Planets, by definition, have a habit of smoothing out really big bumps like a 24 mile tall pyramid.
--NotAn
Admin
Oh, that reminds me. The aforementioned Lotus Notes bug tracking system had 2 fields for this, "Priority" and "Severity." Priority was a number between 1 (highest priority) and 6, and Severity could have values of "Blocker", "Critical", "Major", etc.
No one could figure out what they meant, though. You'd get weird mixes that didn't make any sense. I think I've seen this in CodeBeamer, also...
Admin
Wooden table jokes are lamer then FDR's legs.
Admin
The Real WTF is that they use a paid tool when you have excellent OSS bug tracking software out there... bugzilla anyone?
Admin
Agreed, but the problem with OSS is that, in a sufficiently large company, OSS has to go through the legal department for approval, etc. Sometimes, the cost of legal exceeds the cost of the license, and if not, in some cases, the features of the proprietary product exceed the features in the OSS product. I'm not familiar enough with either product to make the call in this case, however, OSS isn't always the answer.
Admin
(That's not to say all commercial systems are better than Bugzilla, but the one I'm familiar with definitely was. I just can't remember its name right now.)
Admin
Gasps!
Too soon?
:)
Admin
Nice. That is my usual line. "sure that works, in theory. Then again, communism is GREAT ... in theory"
Admin
Bugzilla, but it sucks.
Admin
Admin
Great WTF, I really liked the Google ad I got on this page: "Do-It-Yourself Graphics. -- SmartDraw"
Admin
Yep, issue tracking is useless, and status meetings rock. Oh, and programmers are also more productive in open cubicle farms, and all you ever need for a functional spec are a couple of pieces of paper submitted by users with one or two scribbled paragraphs. And performance optimization is a waste of time. Most importantly, a project is deemed successful as soon as the first version ships.
Right?
Admin
No, because don't forget, all open source software is written by sanctimonious, communist moochers.