How do you organize your temporary workfiles?

Question

I do alot of bugfixing and implementing new features for several different customers. These customers all report their bugs, change requests and new feature request into our Trac system. Sometimes these requests result in me creating some SQL change scripts, sometimes there are Excel documents or Access databases with testdata, Word documents from the customer and so on. Alot of files that are used to fix one ticket and then can be deletede when the ticket is closed.

I usualy do this by creating folders in the filesystem like this: /customerXX/TicketNNNNN and then just dumping everything in there.

How do you organize your workfiles? Have you found some fantastic tool to do this?

Answer 1

JIRA has been quite helpful for this at my site. It supports issue tracking, file attachments,and you can easily customize and categorize your projects and issues.

Answer 2

I use Fogbugz and I add all file to the case. I believe that no matter what application you use, The important is to keep this files for future references. If your bug-tracking tool does not let you attach file then add the files to the version control.

Answer 3

I would say for scripts or files that are related to a particular ticket, the best thing to do would be to attach the file to that ticket in your issue tracking software - almost all issue trackers that I've worked with will allow you to do this. That way, you can look back and a) see exactly what you did in case something goes wrong, or b) do exactly the same thing if the issue comes up again later. That's almost certainly the best place to keep files with extra info from the customer, too (or at least the first place most people will look).

For frequently re-used scripts that aren't specific to a particular ticket, I would create a scripts/ or bin/ directory in the associated project, and keep them in there.

I also have a small handful of useful files that I keep in src/misc/ off my home directory, with things like SQL queries to get readable "explain" output out of Oracle and such, that aren't specific to any particular project. The number of these is small enough that subdirectories aren't necessary, though - I suspect if you ended up with a large number of these files, many of them could/should be moved to specific projects or your issue tracking system.

Answer 4

We use CaWeb4 and find it very easy to use for our bug tracking.