Bugzilla as a task management tool

[Christopher Hicks]

On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Ryan Boder wrote:
> I see on the roadmap page that... 
> 
> While the potential exists in the code to turn Bugzilla into a technical
> support ticket system, task management tool, or project management tool, we
> should focus on the task of designing a system to track software defects.
> 
> Do the current developers plan to keep this mindset and never make Bugzilla
> a task management tool?
> 
> I am asking because I am working on a scheduling tool and I want to work
> well with Bugzilla, so if it will ever be a task management tool I would like
> to support Bugzilla tasks, but if it isn't I will implement tasks myself.
> 
> I am aware that Issuezilla does this, but I am only interested in making it
> work nicely with Bugzilla.

Bugzilla is really close to being very good as a task management tool, 
project management tool, and a technical support ticket system.  It's 
being used as such by many folks.  What's missing?

- the idea of bugs within bugs.  While bugzilla's bug dependancies can be 
used to simulate tasks and subtasks it would often make more intuitive 
sense to have tasks within a bug that can be added and completed.

- I use bugzilla for my personal todo list.  The aforementioned 
functionality would make that process much easier.  Being able to print 
out a list of bugs prioritized and showing the open tasks associated with 
each would be phenomenal.

- Tasks within a bug could be tracked in the database as if they were 
bugs, but have a flag that indicates they're a task instead of a bug.  A 
different field or maybe the value of the flag would point to the parent 
bug for the task.  Tasks would in effect be treated as lightweight bugs 
and could have time and notes associated with them.  These notes should 
show up as part of the parent bug as well.  A note similar to the one used 
to show time associated with a comment could show that a note is 
associated with a task and the name of the task.

- a bridge to something like http://www.opengroupware.org/ which just 
announced itself today.

- a common project to generate bills based on time tracked in bugzilla.  
This is something I'm sure many people do already, but having a common set 
of scripts for generating bills, and tracking billed and unbilled time 
would be extremely handy.

I keep meaning to play with the mozilla-specific interface (bugxula?) too.

Even if this needs to be maintained as a seperate branch from the "real" 
bugzilla development I would be happy to help out.

-- 
</chris>

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