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Tuleap offers a range of open source agile and software development tools. One of them is dedicated to issue/artifact/incident tracking, the one in green in the following image. This module lets teams create, update, monitor, and resolve issues and provides features like project report graphs. To better understand the key concepts of Tuleap Tracker, read this article.

open source issue tracking system

What is Tuleap issue tracking system?

Issue tracker, bug tracking tool or IT service management system, you can name it as you want because it can do so many thinks. Tuleap Tracker is the most powerful and flexible tracking system on the market. And it is full Open Source. How lucky you are!

Tuleap Tracker is designed to help teams build a large knowledge base of issues, giving everyone access to a complete project history.

  • Provide a common interface, easy to use, that centralize all data,
  • Build a single trusted source, a knowledge base shared with enterprise teams, partners and clients,
  • Automate workflow to avoid manual tasks related to tickets and incident resolution,
  • Assign activities to teammates and monitor progress,
  • Track tickets’ resolution status and store customers requests history.

Who can use Tuleap Tracker tool and for what?

Because it is highly configurable, Tuleap tracking is suitable for a broad range of users who need to track many different issues.

open source tracking tool

It can be used by:

PeopleExamples of use cases
Project managers
Software developers
– Product and Task management
– Bug resolution
– Project Management
– Waterfall Software development
– Agile Software Development
CEO
IT teams
HelpDesk
– Self-service Ticketing platform
– Incident and Problem Management
– Change Management
– Helpdesk software
– IT Service Management (ITSM)
Software Quality Assurance team– QA processes
– Validation and Testing
– Test Management

In addition, anyone who needs to track constantly-evolving issues can use the Tuleap tracking system. In organizations that use Tuleap, departments other than software development also use Tuleap tracking.

PeopleExamples of issue tracked
Purchasing and accountingContracts, invoices
MarketingTasks, events, campaigns
Human resourcesPeople, training, recruitment, vacation
Help desk teamsSupport requests, SLAs, enhancements
SalesLeads, contracts, opportunities
 

This list is far from exhaustive. In reality, there are no limits to what can be tracked.

The difference between “issue”, “artifact” and “incident”

When it comes to tracking tools, you will find that different terms—issues, artifacts, and incidents—are used to refer to the same thing. At least, they usually refer to the same thing! In layman’s terms, issues, artifacts, and incidents all refer to something you want to track because it will evolve during the life of a project.

Originally, tracking tools were mainly used to monitor bugs. Which is why the legacy terms have a somewhat negative connotation. However, the new generation of tools, including Tuleap tracking, offers a variety of features that let users configure the items they wish to track.

In Tuleap, the tracking system can save and monitor any type of project item.

Basic concepts of Tuleap Project Management and Issue Tracking

To understand what a tracking tool is, it is important to understand the tool’s environment. Here are a few basic concepts to keep in mind:

  • A Tuleap instance: the complete Tuleap ALM platform your administrator has installed on a server. It’s a (large) collection of projects.
  • A project: the workspace belonging to a software development team, with one or more modules.
  • The tracking tool: a Tuleap module activated in a project area. More than one tracker can be used per project to create issues and save changes to the issues throughout the project lifecycle.
  • One tracker: The tracking tool, such as a bug tracker, request tracker, or task tracker, configured to monitor a specific project item. The tracker is a collection of several issues.
  • An issue or artifact: The type of project item—a specific bug, request, or task, to be tracked.
  • A workflow: a Tuleap workflow is the sequence of statuses and transitions that an issue goes through during its lifecycle. With Tuleap, the sequence of steps in a workflow can be automated to save time and make transitions easier. Each tracker can have a specific workflow.
  • Traceability: one of the most powerful capability of Tuleap tracking system is to provide work item tracking overall the software development lifecycle. Traceability involves defining requirements, capturing those requirements, and following links between requirements and other artifacts such as tasks, tests and defects as well as other work items as source code, documents or deliveries.

With Tuleap, you get full traceability and proof of compliance. Look at this video to see how you can link requirements back to tasks, to source code, to jobs and to any items of your project, etc.

Example of tracker in a project workspace

In this Tuleap project workspace, here are 6 different trackers. They are configured differently to get their own workflow. One “story” and one “bug” evolve throughout different stages, done by different user groups. Within each tracker, there are different number of work items. The Bug Tracker collects 58 bugs, among 16 open.

A task in Tuleap typically looks like this.

An issue or a task is presented as a form to fill in. Your Tuleap issues could look different depending on how the project manager has configured the tracker layout and tracker fields.

Most common information used in issues

  • ID:The issue’s unique identification number. No two issues can have the same ID in a single Tuleap instance.
  • Date of creation: the date the issue was created.
  • Last modification: the date of the last change.
  • Description or Summary: a short summary of the issue.
  • Assignee: the person or the group of persons responsible for the issue.
  • Permissions: the persons who have the right to read and modify the issue.
  • References: the other issues and project items (document, source code, test…) linked to this issue.
  • Attachment: a screenshot or any other file whose purpose is to provide additional information about the issue.
  • Follow-up: this is where all changes will be saved. This is the history of the issue. You can track what has been added, removed, or changed, when and by whom.

Types of fields in Tuleap tracker

We’ll see in another tutorial how to customize Tuleap tracker software, move existing fields, add new ones, remove old ones and more. But first, let’s look at the most common fields that can be tracked.

  • String Field: One-line text, such as RDT 45 ! Examples of one-line text fields are defect summaries or tasks.
  • Text Field: can contain any kind of text, eg. an explanation of the issue.
  • Select Box Field and Multiple Select Box Field: allow users to select one or more entries from a list of pre-set choices, instead of entering them manually.
  • Date Field: a field with a calendar to indicate a date usually in YYYY-MM-DD format. So, 2013-03-21 is March 21st, 2013, 2014-12-05 is Dec 5th, 2014.
  • Integer Field: accepts positive or negative values but not decimals. eg. 5
  • Floating Point Number Field: can contain any real number, including fractions and negative values such as 789.65 or -4.56

    More information in the documentation.


How to use Tuleap Open Source Issue Tracker

Agile management, DevOps, Testing


About

Manon Midy

Manon has been working in the software engineering world from 2008. She enjoys the challenge to create economic value for a company where innovation and open source are the DNA. She is convinced it’s possible to provide professional services embracing FLOSS values (open-mind, transparency, co-elaboration) with business objectives. She believes the real strength of Enalean comes from the valuable men and women in their teams, as well as the powerful Tuleap techno.