Looking for hierarchic feature/task tracker system

Question

I use Trac to track my bugs related to my php web application. Tough, mainly I register feature request/tasks in trac. Do you find it a good practice, btw?
It's very handy, becouse I can track my tasks via Eclipse/mylyn, comment and fix them. I like trac very much, but I'm afraid of a lot of loosley coupuled tasks, that almost looks like bugs. Is there a way (or other tracker system) to store my tasks hierarchically? I mean:

• Store module (feature)
  • Add product (feature)
  • List product (feature)
  • Delete product (feature)
  • Unable to delete no name product (Bug)
• Other Module.. etc.

Edit: Is there any other good practice where and how to store tasks hierarchically?

Answer 1

Fogbugz has tasks & subtasks, I haven't worked with this feature enough to see if it would help though. You could play around with the hosted eval version, though. (For my taste, the web interface feels to sluggish for me to use it - but I have that problem with lots of things.)

I recognize your problem as one of my own, however I'd prefer to use separate lists/hierarchies.

[update]
At the moment, I am using the starring and heavy search/filtering, and for "keeping my head on" with quickly incoming tasks or larger refactors, I use pen&paper for temporaries (A5 ringbound booklet) and ToDoList for semi-permanents.

Answer 2

Some of the requirement management tools out there support hierachies, e.g. CaliberRM from Borland. However, these are heavyweight and commercial. This only makes sense if you have some significant amount of information to handle.

Answer 3

Have a look at the Roundup Issue Tracker.

Years ago, before Trac came out, I wrote several user support and development trackers with it. It's very, very easy to customize the database schema and create new html page templates.

To manage hierarchic tasks, you basically define an IssueClass-based task class that way:

task = IssueClass(db, "task",
    dependson=Multilink("task"),    # here, you link tasks to other tasks
    assignedto=Link("user"), 
    keyword=Multilink("keyword"),
    priority=Link("priority"), 
    status=Link("status"))

There's a recipe in the Roundup documentation that shows you how to create "blockers" issues, meaning that you can't close an issue if one of its linked issues is not closed:

http://www.roundup-tracker.org/docs/customizing.html#blocking-issues-that-depend-on-other-issues

Answer 4

TargetProcess supports the hierachical structure you want. It's an agile Software Project Management Software, however it features highly customizable development processes and can therefore be used for Waterfall or Kanban/Lean processes also. The deepest hierachical structure you can have goes like this:

• Program
• Project
• Release
• Feature
• User Story
• Task

There is a free community edition which you can use for up to 5 users. TP has a lot more than just task tracking, it features Bug Tracking, Q&A, Help Desk, Time Tracking...

Answer 5

You mind look at GoPlan: http://goplanapp.com/.

It is fully functional project management web application, which provides to create a hierarchy of tasks. There is a free plan, so You can check it easily. You can have task tree with any depth.

Difference between this tool and Trac is that GoPlan is not directed to maintain source code, but a project itself, so You cannot close Your tickets from Eclipse. Unfortunately tasks do not have resolutions (tickets have, but they cannot be arranged in hierarchy), but I think it is not a kind of disadvantage that discourages from using this application.

Answer 6

JIRA also has this functionality + it's almost free ($10 for 10 users).

See here, and here.

And yes... I think this is good practice, just don't over exploit it.

And this is how it looks like:

Answer 7

You've probably already thought of this, but I'll put this in just in case. In Trac, I oftentimes organized tickets as sub-tasks, at least through convention by simply placing links to those tickets in the description of the master ticket. What's nice about this is that closed tickets are shown as crossed out, so you can get an idea of the status of the sub-tickets at a glance. OK, so it's not setting up a hierarchy, but it's a flexible system that also allows you to set up other relationships; for example you can also reference another ticket as a dependency or related issue.

Answer 8

You could stick with Trac and look for desired functionality in http://trac-hacks.org/

That looks like what you want (there might be others I just did a fast search):

• http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/MasterTicketsPlugin
• http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TracTicketDepgraphPlugin

We are using a couple of plugins from http://trac-hacks.org/ with 0.11 and they work great.