88177 - New project: Taskzilla

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

I've seen the current incarnation of Bugzilla used as a task manager a couple of
times already: "bugs" become "tasks"; "people" become "programs"; and
"components" become "projects" that people are working on.

This works really well because a lot of the logic of a "bug" applies to tasks in
a business as well (for instance, at a consulting firm I work at, where we're
looking at using bugzilla for this); some tasks rely on other tasks. Some people
work cooperatively on tasks (cc); managers might QA the task to make sure it's
done to their specifications; a task has an "owner" that is responsible for
making sure it gets done correctly... the correlations can go on and on.

The great thing about bugzilla as it is now is that it handles most of the dirty
work for a "task" system right now: it does "task" dependencies, attachments,
keeps a log of what was discussed between those working on the tasks during its
completion, has all the logic for sorting/querying "tasks", etc.; in other
words, bugzilla has a huge amount of wonderful functionality for the management
of tasks as well as bugs.

A couple of things it does lack: time tracking/billing management, and some
other business requirements of a small business task manager (which I'm
currently starting to gather based upon what the company I work for uses it for).

It would be cool if bz3 could use some sort of "plugin"-type design for
description fields in a "bug"/"task" so that the current bugzilla engine could
be extended for not only bugs, but tasks, and anything else that lends itself to
this type of collaborative effort.

Thus, it would be nice if bz

Comment 1

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

Reassigning bug to myself for now... Hixie doesn't need more work right now. :-)

Comment 2

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

The fix to this bug should be a no-op once bug 13540 is fixed.

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

The Bugzilla 3 component is going away.  We're going to depend on the Milestones 
for this.  At the time this component was created, we didn't have milestones for 
Bugzilla.

Comment 4

[Margaret Lum]

Suggestion:

For customizing bugzilla into a task-management utility, can this be done such 
that a handful of configuration files can be tweaked?

My company wants me to customize a new bugzilla instance for purposes of doing 
Taskzilla-type things.  In the interim, while I do this, I want some kind of 
path to retain the existing data that will be produced from this instance.  I 
will need to migrate this to the proposed Taskzilla when you guys release it.

Taskzilla has been targetted as Bugzilla 3.0-based, and I read that 3.0 is a 
new re-write?  What does this mean for anyone who's 2.1X(.Y)-based?  We will 
also need a migration path to retain any previous customizations we might have 
made.

I'm not a believer in re-inventing the wheel, hence my comments.  I want to 
make use of whatever you guys come up with, but would prefer to have the 
simplest way for doing what my company needs.  And I don't want to pre-empt 
future Taskzilla usage by starting on a customizations rampage with an existing 
bugzilla instance.

Comment 5

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

There will most certainly be an upgrade path for standardized 2.x Bugzilla
fields whenever 3.0 hits the scene; if you customize a lot of fields to tack on
"Taskzilla"-like features to BZ, these probably won't be supported by our
official upgrade process, so you'll have to hack something together yourself
(possible) or hope that we add enough features to fulfill you needs in 2.x.

Having said that, Bugzilla is working pretty well as a task tracker already; bug
24789 will increase its usefulness in that space.

If there are other features you want, I would recommend filing them as RFEs and
Ccing [e-mail]; he focuses on a lot of enterprise features, of
which increasing Bugzilla's usefulness as a task tracker is one of those goals.

I'm actually thinking about resolving this bug as a duplicate of bug 13540.

Comment 6

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

In modern times, all of the things in the original comment are pretty much
possible. It's very easy to change the name of Bugzilla and the word "bug."
Also, we have time-tracking now.