98310 - Assignment workgroups will help departmentalized organizations

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Extension Ideas, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

A concept that I've seen on a number of other bug tracking and ticket tracking
systems that Bugzilla is missing is the concept of "workgroups".

When a new bug is opened, the bug does not get assigned to a specific person,
but to a workgroup, or a department.  Each workgroup would have an owner, or a
team leader, who could decide the notification method for new tickets in that
workgroup.  For example, unassigned tickets could have their mail sent to a
specific person (the team leader, or perhaps a delegate), or they might want
everyone in the workgroup to get mail on it.

When someone takes on the bug, it's THEN that the bug is actually assigned to a
specific person.  It could be the team leader delegating the bugs to various
team members, or it could be a team member who happened to see the bug and
decides to jump in and take it, or however.  Once the bug is owned, the mail
would only go to the owner.

Workgroups would only define groups of people.  The same workgroup could
conceivably own more than one component.

There should be a tier of responsibility within the workgroup (regular team
members, and the team leader, at a minimum, and perhaps who the manager or
director for that team is).

This would require a new status (perhaps called OWNED) that would take the place
of the current use for ASSIGNED (meaning the bug actually belongs to a person)
and ASSIGNED would mean that the bug was assigned to a workgroup.

Another benefit of this system is that it would allow a popup menu of assignees
(which would contain the workgroups, and not the potential owners) because the
list would likely be small enough to be manageable.

There should be an option in the global system preferences for the site to
decide whether they want to force owners to be members of the workgroup or not.
 Many sites would probably use this.  Most of the open source places would not,
since in the open source community pretty much anyone can own anything :)

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

you suppose something like this would help for the components on mozilla.org
whose owners are being set to bogus addresses because they're all volunteer?

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning all of my "future" targetted bugs to indicate that I'm not presently
working on them, and someone else could feel free to work on them.

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning all of my "future" targetted bugs to indicate that I'm not presently
working on them, and someone else could feel free to work on them. (sorry for
the spam if you got this twice, it didn't take right the first time)

Comment 4

[Paul]

I like the idea of assigning bugs to a group.  Unfortunatly there are a bunch of other ideas wrapped up in this "meta-bug".  IMHO, some of these ideas should be split out (and then RESOLVED WONTFIX, because the other comments don't seem like a Bugzilla thing but rather external management of the workgroup.)

I'm pretty sure this bug is just to "add the ability to assign bugs to a group".

Is that agreed?


(In reply to comment #1)
> you suppose something like this would help for the components on mozilla.org
> whose owners are being set to bogus addresses because they're all volunteer?

Yes! I added Bug 97662 as depending on this bug.

Comment 5

[George Fischhof]

We would need group assignment function too. It's very important for us.