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Improving workflow for changing ticket states

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csciora

23 Apr, 2009 05:58 PM

Hello, everyone.

After a ticket's been created, it's assigned a "Responsible Party", "Milestone" and "State". We use these for moving the ticket through the resolution process until it's finally been resolved or removed. Along the way, those three parameters change constantly. The current editing process required going to a list of tickets, clicking one and changing one or all of those three states. Repeat for every open ticket. It's a cumbersome process for any sizable numbers of tickets and probably a complete pain after 50+. Which really isn't very many tickets between release dates.

Wordpress has the same requirements for editing batches of posts. The states are a little different: Author, Publish Date, Publish Status, etc., but the concept is the same.

Wordpress 2.7 release handles this elegantly in two ways: quick editing and bulk editing. Quick editing expands the page slightly to change some basic options. The critical difference is the page doesn't refresh causing you to lose your place in the list. Big help for for changing states quickly. Bulk editing lets you checkbox select an entire group of posts and change one or more parameters. These two operations make changing things much easier and would instantly improve Lighthouse editing. For large batches of tickets, it might be 50x faster and much less annoying.

p.s. Bonus suggestion. Please add an "Update Ticket" button to the top. It's often much closer than scrolling to the bottom every time.

Cheers, Chris

1. 1 Posted by Rick on 23 Apr, 2009 07:02 PM

   

   We're working on a bulk editing interface that'll hopefully be out really soon. We've been testing out the bulk edit api call for several weeks now. It's solid enough to edit just 5 tickets in a current milestone, or to move hundreds of tickets to a separate account.

   One of the issues with quick edit is that it would create a lot of extra updates in the ticket history. Also, these changes should be annotated by comments. If you're removing a ticket from a milestone, that change should be backed up by a comment. We can of course mash up sequential updates by the same author into a single update. Though, that can look weird if multiple people are editing the same ticket.

   rick changed state from new to open
   bob changed milestone to "Mid May Sprint"
   rick added comment "blah blah"
   rick set assigned user to "rick"
   

   I think the bulk edit UI will be a big help for ticket workflow. We're also experimenting with alternate milestone interfaces that let you manage ticket state and assignment with drag and drop tickets.

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2. 2 Posted by csciora on 24 Apr, 2009 06:54 PM

   

   I hadn't considered the ticket history, but don't think it's any different with quick edit. The same changes are being recorded now, right? The only difference is it takes longer to make those changes.

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3. 3 Posted by Rick on 24 Apr, 2009 07:05 PM

   

   It's not different, it's just potentially noisier if you make a lot of updates. Consider this:

   You visit a ticket, change the state from resolved to open. Then you change the milestone from "A" to "B". And then, you re-assign the ticket to yourself. With quick-edit, this would be 3 entries in the ticket history. Currently, you'd do this on a single form, hit save, and see only one entry.

   We're experimenting with an alternate milestone management UI that lets you change state by dragging and dropping a ticket. It's still super alpha, but we hit this problem pretty quickly. Good news is that we solved the issue last night while playing with this experimental UI.
   

   Also, bulk edit is really close now. We're just fixing some issues in IE7 (naturally, sigh).

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4. 4 Posted by csciora on 24 Apr, 2009 07:45 PM

   

   True.

   WP actually doesn't handle it that way, so I wasn't picturing that type of process. The idea was to change all those key elements using quick edit in a single pass, not just one item. You'd have to identify the important or commonly changed items associated with a ticket.

   Here's an example screenshot.

   • screen-capture.jpg 58.2 KB
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5. 5 Posted by Rick on 24 Apr, 2009 07:49 PM

   

   Oh, you mean on the ticket search page. I totally misread that. I was imagining ajax dropdowns on the ticket pages.
   

   There's a greasemonkey library that implements what you want, but it's likely we'll be adding something soon too. However, you will be able to use the bulk edit interface to edit one ticket or 1000 tickets with a single form.

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6. 6 Posted by csciora on 01 May, 2009 04:29 PM

   

   Love the bulk editing, guys. Nice job.

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