Tag: organizational culture

Implemeting an Issue Tracker (Redmine)

For more than half a year now, I’ve been trying to get an issue tracker fully implemented for our IT team within the library. I admit that I’m still working on it. Getting the system up and running was easy enough, but trying to work it into people’s workflow isn’t so easy.

Choosing the Issue Tracker

There are a lot of issue trackers out there, but we are a small team and I wanted the issue tracker running easily and quickly. It’s not something I wanted to spend a lot of time getting up and running, because we had a lot of other projects happening.

Other requirements included:

  • support multiple projects
  • non-members being able to report issues
  • support email issue management (either built-in or plugin)
  • low to no cost

preferable

  • support CAS or LDAP login (either built-in or plugin)
  • documentation area and/or wiki
  • code repository integration
  • open source

I asked around a little bit, and these were the recommendations I got:

  • Asana: 2
  • FogBugz: 1 Against: 1
  • Footprints: – Against: 1
  • Github: 2
  • JIRA: – Against: 2
  • Pivotal Tracker: – Against: 1
  • Redmine: 5
  • Request Tracker: 1 Against: 1
  • SupportPress (for WordPress): 1
  • Trac: 3 Against: 1

Trac and Redmine seemed to be the two forerunners. My problem with Trac was that it didn’t have clear project organization, and no one could confirm that the email issue management plugin worked.

Installation & Setup

Our system administrator took a couple of (not full) days to get it installed and going, and following the instructions were apparently fairly easy. Then it took me maybe half a day to set up all the projects and users with the settings I wanted. The e-mail creation also worked well out of the box. We just had to make sure we had the right settings for what we wanted.

Staff Issue Creation & Management

In order to make it so that staff can file issues without ever having to see Redmine, I created a form in our Intranet (webform module in Drupal). The form had most of the standard fields:

  • Name: automatically filled in with username
  • E-mail: also automatically filled in
  • Related to: options which were essentially the project names
  • Need: options equivalent to tracker e.g. Support, Bug Fix, etc.
  • Priority: options equivalent to priority
  • Summary: email subject line, which then turns into issue name
  • Description: issue details

Once it’s submitted, a copy is sent to our team’s email. Through a cron job (every 5 minutes or so), the email is picked up, and filed.

If the user already exists in the system, Redmine will use the email from the user account to match it to the user, they will automatically become the ‘reporter’ of the issue, and get a copy.

If the user does not exist in the system, Redmine will say that ‘Anonymous’ reported it. This will always happen the first time someone reports an issue as I did not add everyone on staff to the system. So, the first time this happens, I then add the user to the system, and add them as a watcher to the issue.

The one issue I ran into was that I forgot you have to set both the email plugin and each project to accept issues from anonymous users. Simple carelessness really.

Getting Staff to Change their Workflow

I think the hardest part with implementing any issue tracker is getting staff to use it. Within the team, it hasn’t been too difficult. We have a small team and the developers in particular have no problems using it. The only problem I sometimes have is making sure they close issues when they’re done with them.

But even within the team, sometimes it can be difficult to get people to report issues using Redmine. While our manager wanted us to start using it just for the website, it has worked well enough, so we’re strategizing how to get the rest of the staff using it now.

We’ve concluded that it kind of needs to be an all or nothing. So we’ve decided that all non-urgent issues should be done through the intranet form regardless of the project, and that should people email us, we’re going to be emailing them back to submit it through the form.

For any urgent issues and for immediate support, they can still call us. After all, trying to walk someone through editing something on our website or intranet is much easier by phone anyway.

Before we start enforcing it, we’ll be introducing this workflow to staff through various committee meetings in part to gather feedback.

So… we’ll see how it goes.

MozFest 2012: How to Work Open

by Matt Thompson (absent), so actually Gunner

Processes & Tools

The process and tools, and how things are done should be open. Etherpad – like a google doc. Collaborative, and in Mozilla, tied to conference calls.

Give guidelines, not direction.

Open Philosophy

Some are a little open, but to be truly open, everything is open not just the nice looking bits. For example, the Firefox mailing list is open. The discussion on Chrome “kicking their butts” was a public discussion.

Need to pro-actively report out, especially for offline conversations.

Community

If you’re going to work in the open, it’s about the community. Have to ready to share: ownership, control, everything.

How to contribute from day one. Make a wishlist (e.g. documentation, testing – never done). Ask for things to be added to the wishlist.

Have core community values.

Motivations

  • Pain
  • Passion
  • Fame
  • Fun

Having a Narrative

Naming the contributors, and having an ongoing story.

Give other voices a channel. Invite others into the narrative. e.g. put someone else’s story into your blog.

Governance Model

Still have to have governance though. Study other successful projects, e.g. wikipedia. Key is a benevolent dictatorship with radical openness.

Risk

Risk aversion and fear is failure before even beginning.

Study the licenses and pro-actively license your content. e.g. GPL, Mozilla

Disagreements

Leading with questions to ask one-on-one why they

E-mail and IRC suck.

Best practice is to move to audio/video if the e-mail and IRC is not working.

Setting frame for discussion. Turn it from “Do you want a vitamin?” to “Do you want the orange or purple vitamin?” Another example would be to share only benefits of two choices.

Open Corporations

Use open paradigm. For example, Twitter uses volunteers to localize, so even though it doesn’t use an open platform, it uses an open model.

But propriety, locked down systems are in the process of dying. There are companies that are open software corporations e.g. Firefox, Redhat. What really makes you special is customization, service, etc.

Start internally. It doesn’t need to be open externally. It can open within the organization first.

Learn from Others

Study the successful open companies and organizations.

Model

Model for success, status quo and failure as a win, because you have learned what not to do again.

Think ahead and think aloud.

Supporting New Librarians for Conferences & Events

While I admit that I have not gone to many library conferences, I thought I would reflect on attending my recent outing to Seattle.

Funding & Limitations

Fairly obvious, but it was important for me to know how many conferences I might be able to attend in a year. If hired as a permanent position, most librarians get a set budget for attending conferences and other events, but on contract, it’s a per-event approval process (as it tends to be at most institutions).

Based on what I heard from others, I think it is key to know what kind of policy administration usually has. I’ve heard from some that non-permanent full-time librarians get absolutely no funding, and even permanent full-time librarians sometimes have to wait 1-2 years before getting funding.

There is, of course, the choice of funding a trip yourself on your own time, but these costs can be prohibitive for new graduates or those with lesser financial means.

Choosing the Right Conferences

On a bit of a side note, I think it is also up to the individual to pick and choose what’s right for them. There are so many conferences being held all the time, it can be very difficult to choose. Being able to only choose 1-2 conferences in a year, I decided against the larger, more general conferences (such as CLA, ALA, or the provincial ones) because I felt that many of the sessions were just not relevant to my interests and position. Instead, I decided to focus on technology related conferences, namely Access and Code4Lib.

Other more local events, which only involves work time, with little or no fees and travel costs can help to supplement or be alternatives to larger events as well, especially regional versions of larger events. Once again though, depending on the policies of the organization, this might involve an individual paying their own way and using vacation time to attend.

How Can We Help?

One of the discussions I got involved with while in Seattle was, how can we help new graduates/librarians (and librarians in more restrictive positions perhaps) attend conferences?

While many conferences offer discounts on registration fees or free attendance for volunteers, registration fees are not usually that high (at least not at library conferences). Even airline tickets are fairly low cost when flying within the US (though admittedly to/from/within Canada can be quite expensive). What makes a trip prohibitive then is usually the hotel, which generally costs at least $100/night.

Then, what can be done to help with these costs?

  • Scholarships: many have student scholarships, which is great, but maybe they can be opened up or a couple can be made for those in need (who are not necessarily students) – it was the only reason I could attend Code4Lib this year
  • Roomshare/Rideshare: while we had this at Code4Lib, I’m not sure how well it was advertised (but then I got in late in the game). Maybe if it was advertised on the main webpage or somewhere in the registration process, a list of people willing to share can be generated.
  • Hostel Room: Similarly, facilitate a way for a group to get a hostel room together (while they might still be strangers, personally, I would not mind so much with fellow conference attendees as opposed to complete, possibly unfriendly strangers).
  • Ask Locals to Offer a Couch/Floor/etc.: I admit that this would be probably difficult for large conferences, but if locals could offer a place to sleep to those in need, I think it would be a great way to encourage new folks to attend. (Organizers can consider writing a simple guideline, such as only if a person doesn’t have any funding sources to attend.)

I’d love to hear other ideas, which might be passed on to conference organizers, especially for Code4Lib 2013.