corporate win--their requirements

[Myk Melez]

A large corporation that I'll call Zippy has decided to adopt Bugzilla 
to track defects in its software products across a large development 
division with several thousand employees.  This is a big win for 
Bugzilla, not to mention Zippy.  It also means Zippy will be doing a lot 
of Bugzilla work in the near future to make our application meet its needs.

I want to make sure Zippy contributes their changes back to Bugzilla and 
that our future development takes their needs into account.  To that 
end, I'll be analyzing their requirements and translating them into 
generally-useful feature requests or comments/design suggestions on 
existing feature requests.

Here is a partial list of issues I've identified and what I know about 
them so far.  Please take a look and let me know your thoughts.

Product and User Views

Different products may have different bug tracking needs, especially 
when they are being worked on by separate teams, so it should be 
possible to customize the "enter bug" and "show bug" UIs (showing/hiding 
various fields) based on the product to which a bug belongs.  Different 
types of users (development, QA, project management, etc.) also have 
very different needs and interests, so it should be possible to 
customize the UIs for each of these groups.


Sybase Support

Bugzilla should support Sybase.  Zippy has already done most of the work 
for this, although maybe in a hacky fashion.  We should have a clear 
idea about how customers should add multi-database support so people 
don't waste their time and ours doing it the wrong way.


Custom fields

It should be possible for the Bugzilla administrator to define custom 
fields in addition to the built-in fields.  Custom fields should be 
product-specific.


Third Level of Categorization (sub-component)

It would be useful to have a third level of categorization in addition 
to product and component.


Custom Resolutions

It should be possible to define the resolutions available to bugs on a 
product-specific basis.


Reopened Count

It would be useful to know how many times a bug has been reopened 
without having to count rows on the bug activity page.  This could 
appear right next to the status of reopened bugs.


Pull-down Menu of Assignees

It should be possible to select assignees from a list instead of having 
to type in their full email addresses.


Time Zone-sensitive Date/Time Display

Dates and times should be displayed in the user's time zone, not the 
server's time zone.


Entry of International Data

It should be possible to enter non-ASCII data into Bugzilla.


Project Management Fields

There should be fields in Bugzilla for tracking project status, f.e. 
hours required to fix a bug, estimated fix date, etc.


System Configuration Fields

There should be fields in Bugzilla for more specifically identifying 
reporters' system configurations (CPU, memory, etc.).