Do you have issues? Who doesn't? The bad news is that most of our issues can't be addressed in a technical article such as this one, unfortunately. But the issues that we can discuss (such as customer inquiries, bug tracking, and similar things) are conveniently handled by a genre of software known as "issue tracking systems." This month, we're going to examine this wonderful genre that allows you to get organized, provide improved service to your customers (internal and external), and save time...time that you can use to address those "other" issues.

Sound Familiar?

If your work day is anything like mine, you know how easily important tasks can become buried or forgotten. My day usually goes something like this: I come into the office with a list of tasks I want to accomplish. While working on the first item, I get interrupted by a phone call from a user who has a new item to add to the IT department's "to-do" list. While we discuss his requirements, an email arrives from another user who needs something done yesterday. Glancing up from my desk, I see another user standing in my doorway patiently waiting for me to get off the phone. Sound familiar?

In my travels, I have seen a wide variety of methods used in an attempt to bring order to this chaos, and perhaps yours appears in this list. I've seen people use spreadsheets, 3x5 index cards, the email inbox, a group email inbox (where the entire IT department shares the contents), the MS Notepad application, and even good ol' tablet paper and pencil. On the other end of the spectrum are the high-power (and high-price) groupware applications from IBM, Novel, and Microsoft. My own methods have run this gamut with varying levels of success. When I decided to find a definitive solution that I could use for myself and recommend to my clients (many of whom do not have big budgets), I naturally turned to open-source software.

Although you may not be using issue tracking software in your business, I have no doubt that you have had the opportunity to be on the receiving end of some. Anytime you have received a confirmation number, ticket number, reference number, or number, you are being tracked in this kind of software. That number (Pet Peeve #1: Why do they refer to it as a "number" and then include letters in it?) is a key to a database entry that contains the details of your issue. Attributes include your name, the date and time of the contact, the name (or ID) of the server rep who fielded your call, a synopsis of your issue, the status of the ticket, and anything else germane to the company. Subsequent contacts are noted with the same ticket number, and related tickets are noted. The software typically provides query capabilities so that users can find existing tickets in any number of ways, and reporting capabilities so that users can garner information such as the number of issues or average time spent on each issue.

What I wanted was something that had a Web interface and that could use an open-source database management system. A quick search on freshmeat.net yielded an abundance of candidates. Narrowing down the field by project activity, "freshness" (date of last update), vitality, and visits to the respective candidate project's home page, I decided on three possibilities. I chose the following projects because they all had the aforementioned functionality and provided a good sampling of simplicity, power, and support options.

Flyspray

The first candidate, a program called Flyspray, is what you can put in the category of "item tracking lite." I use that phrase not in a derogatory manner but as a paraphrase of the project author's own description of the software:

"Do you need a Bug Tracking System (BTS) for your programming project? Are you having trouble finding something that suits your needs? Have you tried installing Bugzilla, but found it too complex? You've come to the right place!

Flyspray is an easy to use BTS for those who don't require all the complexities of something like Bugzilla. Developed for The Psi Project, Flyspray is also available for everyone to download and use for their own projects."

Flyspray has all of the basic functionality that you would expect in this type of software. You can create tickets and, for each ticket, specify its category and project, make note of any dependent tasks, and have Flyspray send jabber or email notifications and reminders. There is a rudimentary reporting system, so you can easily gather some statistics on your group's production, such as the number of items that have been opened or closed during a timeframe. The reports are all Web-based, so don't expect management-quality reports from the system. Since Flyspray uses either MySQL or PostreSQL as a back-end, you can easily generate your own reports using something like MS Access, Crystal Reports, or OpenOffice.

I couldn't find a live demo on the project Web site, but there is a rather complete list of screenshots that will give you an idea what the interface looks like.

The installation of Flyspray is quite simple: Once you've dropped the source into a Web server-accessible directory, you're assigned an appropriate user ID and password for the database. Then, you perform a couple of minor edits to complete the configuration file. Setup is accomplished via the Web browser itself. The process can literally be done in under 15 minutes if you're comfortable installing Web-based software.

While I no longer use Flyspray on my company's system, I still have an instance of it installed on my laptop. I find it simple, yet powerful enough to meet my personal needs. Flyspray is truly an open-source project, and as far as I can tell, there is no commercially available support for it. Its simplicity makes it unlikely that you would need commercial support, but I know that some companies refrain from using a product unless such support is available.

Bugzilla

The next candidate is one of the open-source world's heavyweight contenders: Bugzilla. Bugzilla is an extremely sophisticated issue-tracking system from the Mozilla Organization, makers of the superb Web browsers Mozilla and Firefox and the email client Thunderbird. Bugzilla has all of the features of Flyspray but is far more sophisticated. It is an enterprise-level package used by some of the biggest names in open source, including the Gnome and KDE desktop projects, the Apache group (which produces the Apache Web server and hosts the Jakarta projects), and OpenOffice.org (the MS Office replacement). Commercial entities also avail themselves of Bugzilla's many features, Red Hat, Inc. and NASA being two prominent examples. The Bugzilla Web site provides an extensive list of known implementations, so you may want check out who you would be keeping company with should you choose to implement Bugzilla at your company.

If you would like to visit a working implementation of Bugzilla, I suggest that you visit either ugzilla site, or the Apache group's site. Either will give you a good feel for the power of Bugzilla.

As with Flyspray, Bugzilla doesn't have a corporate sponsor from which you can purchase commercial support. However, consultants will happily provide it for you. If commercial support is a criteria that you use in your software selection process, then you can put a check in the "commercial support" column for Bugzilla.

RequestTracker (RT)

The last candidate I'll discuss, and the one upon which I finally settled, is called Request Tracker (RT). It has the same features as Bugzilla. But whereas Bugzilla's name implies that it is optimized to track bugs, RT's name implies a more generalized issue-tracking system. While I can't actually argue that point one way or the other (since one can classify a dissatisfied customer as being a "bug" in your company's performance), it is obvious once you start using RT that its design lends itself to tracking issues in any problem domain. To understand why RT is so flexible, you need to know a bit about its architecture.

The base object in RT is the ticket. A ticket represents one issue, task, or bug and is assigned a serial number when it is created. That number is what ties all activity and attachments to the issue. A ticket is more than a simple database entry. You can configure RT to trigger specific tasks, called "scrips," whenever a ticket is created, modified, or resolved (similar to DB2 triggers). The possibilities range from mail notifications to manipulation of the ticket contents (such as increasing the ticket's priority). Your creativity is the only limiting factor.

Tickets are created in "queues" (the means by which RT groups related issues), and queues represent a very powerful structure in RT's world. You can limit access to the various queues to specific users. Scrips can be configured globally for all queues, or they can be customized and assigned to individual queues. So tickets created in the IT support queue will trigger different actions than tickets created in the customer service queue. It is the queue structure that makes it possible to have one RT installation service the needs of all departments.

RT's most useful feature, and what really sold me on the product, is its email interface: rt-mailgate. Using rt-mailgate, I can have users and customers send email to specific addresses and have each message automatically create a ticket in the appropriate queue, based on the email address that it gets sent to. Subsequent responses and activity will get emailed back to the requester.

This feature comes in very handy. Before installing RT, I had departments that wanted external email to come to a group email address and then be distributed to multiple departmental employees. The result was a great deal of confusion when the customer received multiple replies (or no reply at all). Now, customer emails get routed to an RT queue, the department members get notified that a request has been received, one of the members takes responsibility for the ticket, and the customer receives one response. Best of all, the entire email exchange is archived for future reference, instead of being locked in one user's mailbox.

For those who absolutely won't look at a product that lacks commercial support, RT is a product you'll like. RT is a product of LLC, so support is readily available. Best Practical offers everything from installation to customization to formal training classes at either their site or yours, so I'm sure that their support packages will satisfy the requirements of your company.

Review Them Online

There is just too little space available in one column to do justice to these packages, which is unfortunate. Each of these packages really deserves a column of its own in order to give it a proper review and do justice to its quality.

Fortunately, you can easily review the projects yourself online. If you don't already have an issue-tracking system, you owe it to yourself to check these systems out. The time you spend selecting and installing one will ultimately pay huge dividends in time savings to you and your company, and it will help keep those items on your to-do list from getting lost in the pile of notes you've been keeping on paper.

Barry L. Kline is a consultant and has been developing software on various DEC and IBM midrange platforms for over 21 years. Barry discovered Linux back in the days when it was necessary to download diskette images and source code from the Internet. Since then, he has installed Linux on hundreds of machines, where it functions as servers and workstations in iSeries and Windows networks. He co-authored the book Understanding Linux Web Hosting with Don Denoncourt. Barry can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..