Ticketing
A good ticket / issue tracking / bug tracking system is the center of a process that gets things done. Accelerate your team with a ticketing application that is simple to use, expands with configurations to meet sophisticated needs, supports an agile process, and clearly shows your team what is going on.
Assembla gives you a balance between simplicity and power. You and your team can start quickly with a simple ticket lists and milestones. As your project gets more complex, you can customize the fields and views, and use the agile planner and burndown features to plan your iterations.
Introducing Assembla Tickets
You can use Tickets to relentlessly finish tasks. Post a new ticket in seconds. It appears in the default list of tickets where a team member can see it, assign it, and start work. Post questions as ticket comments, and they get posted into the activity alert stream so someone can answer right away. Loop back to your current list with one click on the top bar, and keep going.
- Move through stages of New, Assigned, Ready to Test, and Fixed
- Optionally, the person working on the ticket can report on time invested, and estimated time remaining with every comment
- Attach files, or attach screenshots with the screen capture applet
- Actions on the ticket are attached to the ticket, and posted to the activity stream
Link with code and requirements
You can work quickly, because Assembla tickets are tightly linked with the code repositories and the wiki.
- Attach a commit comment to ticket 99 with "re #99". The same commit commands work with any supported repository type - Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Github, or external (self-hosted) subversion
- Use commit comment commands to set status, like "closes #99" and "test #99"
- Link from any commit comment to the changeset, and see exactly what happened
- Link to wiki pages with markup like [wiki:pagename]], and to other tickets with #99. Move smoothly between tickets and requirements or specifications on the wiki
Milestones
Assembla milestones represent iterations or releases - the core structure of an agile schedule.
- Calendar shows upcoming milestones
- Milestones can have tickets, tasks, and messages
- For each milestone, see a completion bar, open and closed tickets, and optional burndown
Configuration
- Build new lists with a report builder in the Filters view
- Set the default list
- Add custom fields. Available types include "team member", string, number, date, and select list.
- Specify a default value for any field. For example, assign new tickets to milestone "Backlog"
- Select an email alert strategy - normal team alerts, or email only to the ticket notification list
- Configure the ticket tool to create new tickets from email
- Copy configurations from template spaces
Manage an agile process
We recommend a simple agile process built around the core idea of iterative releases or milestones. The Tickets tool provides features to help you start, manage, and finish an iteration.
- Assign new tickets to the backlog milestone with default field values
- Write a list of task tickets around stories and features in the agile planner view
- The agile planner helps you build incrementally by assigning tickets to various milestones / releases / iterations
- Use batch update and the agile planner to pull tickets out of the backlog into your next iteration
- Enter "estimated time remaining" for each ticket to plan your iteration and see your burndown
- See progress each day in the burndown view
- As you approach the end of an iteration, use batch update to close or reassign tickets, move unfinished tickets to future iterations, and wrap up
Customer support
The optional Support tool implements a classic customer support workflow. On the Support tab, users can enter tickets, see their own tickets, and get notified by email about action on the ticket.
- Allow team members (watchers) or the general public to enter tickets
- Use custom tool permissions to show the support tool, and hide other tools
- Specify the editable fields and default values for new tickets
- Users can see and comment on the tickets they enter
- Users get email notifications of action on their ticket