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Bugtracker - agregation and automated workflow

Intro:
I'm working for a contractor company. We're making SW for different corporate clients, each with their own rules, SW standards etc.
Problem:
The result is, that we are using several bug-tracking systems. The amount of tickets flow is relatively big and the SLA are deadly sometimes. The main problem is, that we are keeping track of these tickets in our own BT (currently Mantis) but we're also communicating with clients in theirs BT. But as it is, two many channels of communication are making too much information noise.
Solution, progress:
Actual solution is an employee having responsibility for synchronizing the streams and keeping track of the SLA and many other things. It's consuming quite a large part of his time (cca 70%) that can be spend on something more valuable. The other thing is, that he is not fast enough and sometimes the sync is not really synced. Some parts of the comments are left only on one system, some are lost completely. (And don't start me at holidays or sickness, that's where the fun begins)
Question:
How to automate this process: aggregating tasks, watching SLA, notifying the right people etc. partially or all together?
Thank you, for your answers.

You need something like Zapier. It can map different applications and synchronize data between them. It works simply:
You create zap (for example between redmine and teamwork).
You configure mapping (how items/attributes in redmine maps to items/attributes in teamwork)
You generate access tokens in both systems and write them to zap.
Zapier makes regular synchronization between redmine and teamwork.
But mantis is not yet supported by Zapier. If all/most of your clients BT are in Zapier's apps list, you may move your own BT to another platform or make a request to Zapier for mantis support.
Another way is develop your own synchronization service that will connect to all client's BTs as each employee using login/password/token and download updates to your own BT. It is hard way and this solution requires continious development to support actual virsions of client's BTs.

You can have a look a Slack : https://slack.com/
It's a great tools for group conversations
Talk, share, and make decisions in open channels across your team, in
private groups for sensitive matters, or use direct messages
one-to-one.
you can have a lot of integrations tools, and you can use Zapier https://zapier.com/ with it to programm triggers.
With differents channels you can notifying the right people partially or all together in group conversation :)

The obvious answer is to create integrations between all of the various BT's. Without knowing what those are, it's hard to say if that's entirely possible. Most modern BTs have an API and support integrations. Some, especially more desktop based ones, don't. For those you probably have to monitor a database directly.
Zapier, as someone already suggested, is a great tool for creating integrations and may already have some of the ones yo need available. I love Slack and it has an API, but messages are basically just text and unless you want to do some kind of delimiting when you post messages to its API, it probably isn't going to work.
I'm not sure what budget is, but it will cost resources to create the integrations. I'd suggest that you hire someone to simply manage these. Someone who's sole responsibility is to cross-populate the internal and the external bug tracking system and track the progress in each. All you really need is someone with good attention to detail for this, they don't have to be a developer. This should be more cost effective than using developer resources on this.
The other alternative is simply to stop. If your requirements dictate that you use your clients' bug tracking software for projects you do for them, just use their software and stop duplicating the effort. If you need some kind of central repository or something for managing work maybe just a simple table somewhere or spreadsheet with the client, the project, the issue number, the status and if possible a link to the issue in the client's BT. I understand the need and desire for centralizing this, but if it's stifling productivity, then the opportunity costs are too high IMO.
If you create an integration tool foe this, you will indeed have a very viable product. This is actually a pretty common problem.

Switching from Trac to Phabricator

We're currently looking into switching from Trac to Phabricator and I was wondering if anyone could share their experience transfering the wikis and tickets they had on Trac.
I've looked into Conduit and I suppose making a script getting Trac's info with XMLRPC and pushing them in Phabricator would work. What's missing is I haven't found a method to create a Wiki page or add comments to an existing task.
If anyone has an idea on how this could be achieved it would help greatly.
Thank you

It's a while since we migrated away from Trac to other solutions, but our current migration to Phabricator has dealt with issues from a couple of other similar solutions (Github, JIRA, Redmine) to Phabricator.
From our experiences (so far):
We haven't used Conduit for wiki pages, so I don't know how well that works (manually moved everything instead - good opportunity to clean up documents).
You can add comments to tasks with maniphest.update (comments field).
Some of the key obstacles we've encountered:
Lack of a project/component structure like as most other bug trackers (less of a problem in trac since it is 1 project per instance, unless you are migrating multiple trac instances). I assume this is intended to be handled by the "Projects" object in Phabricator (tagging with multiple objects), but it's not an obvious 1-to-1 mapping. And frankly, the whole "Projects" thing in Phabricator is a bit of a mess right now. The concept is cool, but is also pretty easy to abuse in ways perhaps not intended.
No way to add dependencies/blocking tasks via Conduit. This is a dealbreaker for some of our migration efforts. They have a task on this at phabricator.com-
Adding comments via conduit, will add them as the user who is doing the import (not the intended behavior). There is an admin option that can be switched on to allow admins to impersonate other users, though they recommend against it. We haven't used it so far (easier, for the projects we've migrated, to just add the commenting user and date of the comment in the comment text).
Note that unless you preserve this explicitly, you will lose possible relevant information such as the date a task was submitted, etc.
You might want to take a look at Arcyon, which is a little tool which wraps up some of the conduit functionality required for migration in a more script-friendly interface:
https://github.com/bloomberg/phabricator-tools

What is the best way to store software documentation? [closed]

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Closed 11 years ago.
An obvious answer is "an internal wiki". What are the pros and cons of a wiki used for software documentation? Any other suggestions? What are you using for your software documentation?
Loren Segal - Unfortunately we don't have support for any doc tool to compile information from the source code comments but I agree it would be the best way to store technical documentation. My question was about every kind of documentation tho - from sysadmin type to user documentation.

That's a very open ended question, and depends on many factors.
Generally speaking, if you use a language that has good documentation generation tools (javadoc, doxygen, MS's C# stuff), you should write your documentation above your methods and have your tools generate the pages. The advantage is that you keep the source of your text alongside your code which means it is orgnanized in the logically correct place and easily editable when you make a change to the behaviour of the method.
If you don't have good doc tool support or don't have access to source code, wiki's aren't a bad idea, but they're a second choice to the above.
Note: I'm talking only about code documentation here. Other artifacts obviously cannot be stored alongside code-- a wiki is a great place to put those documents. Alternatively if you use some CMS you can simply commit them in some docs/ folder as text/pdf/whatever files to be editable via the repository. The advantage there is that they stay with the repository if it is moved whereas a wiki does not (necessarily).

Tools are important, but don't get too bogged down in finding the magic tool. No tool I've found yet has a "document everything magically using tiny invisible elves" tickbox. :-)
A wiki will work fine. Or Sharepoint. Or Google docs. Or you could use a SVN repository. Hell you could do it with pens, notepaper, and a file cabinets if you really really had to. (I really don't recommend that!)
The big important key is you need to have buy-in throughout the organization. What happens in a lot of shops is they go and spend a bunch of time and money on some fancy solution like Sharepoint, and then everyone uses it religiously for about two weeks, and then people get busy with hitting the latest milestone and that's the last anyone hears about it.
Depending on your organization, field, the type of products your developing, etc., there are a few solutions to that, but one way or another you need to set up a system and use it. Appoint someone the official documentation czar, give them a cluebat, and tell them to hit people in the head everytime they say "oh yeah, I'll finish documenting that next week...". if that's what it takes. :-)
As for tools... I'd recommend Confluence by Atlassian. It's a fine wiki, it's designed to work in an enterprise environment, it has a lot of nifty features, it's customizable, it integrates well with some of the Atlassian's other nifty tools, and is basically a pretty solid product.

«Software documentation» is a very general term. There is «End User documentation», «Developer documentation», «QA Documentation». First one is usually developed by qualified techwriters. Other ones may be dynamically formed from wikis, documentation comments from source code etc. All this stuff maintenance process usually is very complex and each software company follow its own way. But there is one necessary point for all these ways: each code commiter, architect, manager, qa engineer MUST store well arranged each piece of information which may be helpful for the others. And someone else MUST keep an eye on this pieces storage and rearrange pieces if required. All this steps greatly improve all activities related to development process.

Assuming you are talking about code documentation versus user documentation, an internal wiki is great if you do not need to distribute the documentation for the code outside of your organization, to contractors or partners.
Javadoc or DOxygen is more suitable if you want distributable code documentation.
If you are referring to user documentation, you may want to have a look at DITA.

I started experimenting with a way to do user documentation with these goals:
Markdown/Html/Javascript/file-based relatively linked documents for portability (can run on local file system or you can throw it on a webserver), built-in handling of screenshots (interactively resize), and open source in case anyone else may want to do something with the crazy thing.
Your document source is written in Markdown and rendered to Html via Javascript at browser runtime.
Mandown - http://wittman.org/mandown/

We currently use inline documentation parsed by an external application (PHP + PhpDocumenter) plus various internal wikis. At times it's painful at best (mainly because only one person update the wikis or the docs...)
However, I've been looking at using ikiwiki to do internal docs. It integrate with your source countrol system (including Git, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar, TLA and Monotone) so all your docs track with your project. It is built in Perl and has an extensive plugin system (including multiple markup languages, with the default being Markdown). Also, the source control system is plugin based, so if what you use isn't immediately supported you could add your own. In your preferred language, if need be, since it supports non-perl plugins, too.

My company uses a variety of Sharepoint and a wiki. Sharepoint for specific documents like requirements, presentations, contracts, etc, while the wiki is used as a help guide a developer repository for tutorials on using internally developed libraries.

Yeah, we use a wiki, we also use Google documents. I find that Google documents is better than most wikis I've tried and, if you don't need to track all changes, you lose nothing. Google docs provides a good collaboration framework.

Tools to effectively manage the information?

How do you guys manage the information overflow?
What are the tools that you guys use?
One of the usefull tool is RSS feed reader.
Does Any body uses any other tools or any other ways to effectively manage the information?

Be an information snob.
If the blog doesn't absolutely rock your world, don't read it. It's so easy to get bogged down, even obsessed, with too much information. No matter what tools you have, you're still human and can only read so many words per day.

I use Evernote to keep notes and search through them.

I use Google Reader for the feeds. Split it up in multiple categories, 'A' with the more unique stuff, 'B' with the spam (Digg for example, easy to ignore because the important stuff shows up in 'A'), 'C' for my webcomics.
I always read the stuff in 'A', when bored I read 'C' and 'B' when I have spare time. It happens a lot of time that I'll mark 'B' as read just to get rid of it.
For work I'm stuck with Outlook, so I use the 'Tasks' function of Outlook a lot to get things sorted. Also a big believer of 'Inbox Zero' (http://www.43folders.com/izero).

I use a small number of tools and techniques, because it is easy to get distracted managing the information management tools, rather than managing the information.
Google Reader - The key for me was creating #work and #home labels, for the appropriate location.
TiddlyWiki - I keep track of all my notes for work projects in a TiddlyWiki file.
Delicious - I keep my bookmarks here. When I come across a link I want to read later (usually in my RSS Reader), I tag it #readreview. When I read it, I delete it unless it is useful reference, then I retag appropriately.
Local bookmarks - I store bookmarks on the browser toolbar in folders so I can middle-click and open all in tabs. Obviously these would be limited in number :-). I also have a bookmarklets folder.
I don't have a PDA. I have a pad of graph paper on my desk that I use for writing temporary notes and diagrams (permanent notes go into the TiddlyWiki). A lot of "productivity blogs" like to promote various tools, and some of these caught on for people, but I find my system is pretty simple and easy for me to manage. This makes it useful.

Well, this is an obvious one, but iGoogle seems to do a great job for me.

Depends on what information you are looking to manage. Can you be more specific?
I use google reader to handle things i read, RememberTheMilk to remind me of what i have to do, and gmail overall to quickly store and search data/correspondences.
Oh and i use the hipster PDA too!
You should probably check out Lifehacker for more tools and Getting Things Done apps.

Like you say most sites have a RSS feed today. Get a RSS Reader that sync between computers if you use more than one computer, so you don't have to mark alot of post as read. A good program is FeedDeamon, its free and sync between computers, there is even a online version as well, if you are on the road. FeedDeamon also have tools to help you identify the feeds, that you dont really read, and gives you a top 10 of feeds that you look on alot. This can help you delete bad RSS-Feeds, and also help you organize you're feeds.
I also use Delicious, to keep my bookmarks in sync, and is very handy if you bookmark alot.
Other than that, I don't really use any more tools - just the common sence that there is only 24 hours in the day, so dont use it to just read information that you don't need - bookmark interesting blog post from RSS, and read them later when you need to.

I've been using Delicious quite a bit over the past 2 years and it's been a great help.

If you're primarily interested in blogs, what I think we need is a way to prioritize the information that we, personally, are interested in. There used to be an RSS reader called wTicker (now demised) that used Bayesian filtering to rate articles for you. Another product under development, Particls, would similarly watch what you read and highlight similar content.
What about other types of information, though? For example, the tasks that OneNote or EverNote, or more obscure tools like Zoot aim to facilitate?

It depends on the type of information you meant. The answers above contain most of the tools. But if you use ms office you shall explore Office OneNote.

iGoogle: News, RSS, Wether, New Films, E-Mail widgets
ToDoList: every day work aspects
Local MediaWiki, for local company knowleges
Smartphone MS Excel for personal finances.

I still read news and blogs from RSS feeds. Feedly is the best tool for that right now.
When I find something interesting in Feedly, I add it to Pocket and read later. A Premium account allows me to highlight paragraphs I would like to save.
I also set up a receipt on IFTTT that monitors my likes on Twitter and adds links from the liked tweets to Pocket too.
As Substack grows, there is the new email newsletter boom. But my inbox is also a place where I do my work. So, I wrote an apps script file to receive newsletters once or twice a day and prevent them from distracting me from work. And then, I published it as Silent Inbox add-on that plugs into your Gmail.

Getting developers to use a wiki [closed]

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I work on a complex application where different teams work on their own modules with a degree of overlap. A while back we got a Mediawiki instance set up, partly at my prompting. I have a hard job getting people to actually use it, let alone contribute.
I can see a lot of benefit in sharing information. It may at least reduce the times we reinvent the wheel.
The wiki is not very structured, but I'm not sure that is a problem as long as you can search for what you need.
Any hints?

Some tips:
Any time someone sends information by email that really should be in a wiki, make a page for that topic and add what they put in the email. Then reply "Thanks for that info, I've put it into the wiki here so that it's easier to find in the future."
Likewise, if you have information you need to share that should be in the wiki, put it there and just send an email with a link to it, rather than email people.
When you ask people for information, phrase it so that putting such documentation in the wiki should be considered the default or standard: "I searched in the wiki but I couldn't find it. Have you put that info up there yet?"
If you are the "wiki champion", make sure other people know how to use it, e.g. "Did I go through how to create a new page with you yet?"
Edit the sidebar to make sure it is relevant to your work.
Use "nav box" style templates on related pages for easier navigation.
Put something like {{Special:NewPages/5}} on the front page, or recent changes, so that people can see the activity.
Take a peek at Recent changes every few days or week, and if you notice someone adding information without being prodded, send them an email or drop by and give them a little compliment.

As I mentioned before, a Wiki is very unorganized.
However, if that is the only argument from your developers, then invest some effort to create a simple index page and keep it updated (either do it yourself or ask people to link their contributions to the index). That way, the Wiki might grow into a very nice and quite comprehensive collection of documentation for all your work.

We've been using a wiki in some form or another for a while now, but it does take a while for people to get on board. You might find that you will be the only one writing articles for some time, but bear with it, other people will come on board eventually.
If someone sends an email around that contains information related to the project then helpfully point them in the direction of the wiki - and keep doing that - they should get the hint.
We have a SharePoint portal and use the wiki from there - we customised it with our own branding so that it "looks the part" - I really feel this has helped to improve the uptake of it.
Make sure that everyone is aware that the wiki is even more informal than email.... because there will be a "fear factor" that people may think anything they add to the wiki will be over-analysed.

I think most of the answers so far are spot on - the more you plug away at it yourself, the larger the body of useful information will become, so slowly but surely people will naturally start to use it.
The other approach you could use is this: Suggest that every time someone asks another team member a question about the project, they should answer the question as normal, but also add the answer to a section of the Wiki. This may take a few minutes extra, but it will mean that the next time someone asks the same question (which they inevitably will), you can save time by pointing them at the Wiki. This, in turn, should help people to start using the Wiki as a first source of information and help overall up-take.

You can't force developers to do something they do not have an incentive of using for; unfortunately wikis, like documentation (well, in fact wikis are documentation) rarely have any "cool" value for developers. Besides, they're already deep into dev work -- could you really bother them with a wiki?
That being said, the people who pushed for the wiki (e.g., you) should be primarily responsible for updating it, and you really would have a lot of work cut out for you if you're serious about it.
You might also try the ff:
It's not very structured you say -- a lot of people get turned off from ill-structured (hard-to-search/browse) wikis. So maybe you can fix that first
Maybe you can ask lead developers/project managers to populate it with things that are issues for them: things like code conventions and API design for your particular project
Lead by example: religiously document your part of the system. Setting a precedent may encourage others to do the same

Sell the idea of using the wiki to the developers. You've identified some benefits, share those with the developers. If they can see that they'll get something of value out of it they'll start using it.
Example advantages from What Is a Wiki
Good for writing down quick ideas or longer ones, giving you more time for formal writing and editing.
Instantly collaborative without emailing documents, keeping the group in sync.
Accessible from anywhere with a web connection (if you don't mind writing in web-browser text forms).
Your archive, because every page revision is kept.
Exciting, immediate, and empowering--everyone has a say.

I have done some selling and even run some training sessions. I think some people are turned off by the lack of WYSIWYG editing and ability to paste formatted text from Word or Outlook. I know there are some tools to work around these, but they are still barriers.
There are some areas where the wiki is being used to log certain areas, but people who update those are not doing anything else with it.
I will use the wiki to document my specialised area regardless as it acts as a convenient brain extension. When starting a new development I use it as a notepad for ideas that I can expand on as it progresses.
It would help if management would give it some vocal support, even if it is not made mandatory.

I have a hard job getting people to actually use it, let alone contribute.
One of the easiest ways to get people to contribute to a wiki, is to actually have them provide contents in a wiki-suitable fashion, i.e. so that whatever they post using their usual channels of communications (newsgroups, mailing lists, forums, issue trackers, chat), is basically suitable for inclusion on the wiki.
So that others (users/volunteers) can simply take such contents and put them on the wiki.
This sounds more complicated than it really is, it's mostly about generalizing questions and answers, so that they are not necessarily part of a conversation, but can be comprehensible, meaningful and useful in a standalone fashion.
For example a question like the following:
how do I get git to clone a remote repository???
Can be answered like this:
Hello,
Just use git clone git://...
But questions can also be answered in a less personal style:
In order to clone a git repository, you will want to use the clone parameter to git:
git clone git://....
What I am trying to say is that most discussions in a project can and should be easily used to become documentation eventually. With this sort of mindset, your documentation can actually grow rather rapidly. You only need to get people to keep in mind that useful information should be ideally provided in a fashion that is suitable for wiki inclusion.
I have witnessed several instances where open source projects started to use this approach to some extent and while some people (largely new users) complained that answers were not very personal, the body of documentation was increasing steadily, because other people simply monitored such discussions and started to copy/paste such responses to the wiki.
Basically, this is one of the easiest ways to get people to contribute to a wiki, without requiring them to actually use it themselves, the only thing that's required of them is a shift in thinking.

If the developers still need to maintain 'real' documentation (s.a. Word documents), I see no way to meaningfully duplicate that on a Wiki.
It does not make sense for people to write twice
Any duplicated data is prone to get out of sync, soon.
What my current customer has done is move all this to Wiki. So I only document once, and I do it on the Wiki.
This is okay. Working with Wiki is more tedious than with Word, but at least the doc is online and others can mix-and-match with it.
Another working solution (imho) would be to store docs alongside the source, on subversion. But then the merging system needs to be able to cope with rich text etc. as well. I don't know, if any solution for that exists (other than using HTML or LaTex, which actually would not be bad picks).

Find "sticky" items (sub-3 pg. docs / diagrams / etc) something that the team seems to be creating again and again & post it on the wiki. Make sure everyone has access to the wiki and knows its there - set up a notification mechanism if possible. With some luck, the next time they have to access, rather than dig it out of version control or their machines - they should hit the wiki.
If they still don't, try to see if the team has enough slack to actually use the wiki - Subtler issues may lie beneath their reluctance.

Take a look at the advice at http://www.ikiw.org/ Grow your Wiki

Just to add to some of the excellent advice being offered here...
As a dev in a small company that does largely gov't contract work in the 6-24 month range, I find that my time is often split between development and writing status reports (right up there with writing documentation, only worse!) Having a wiki to slap down unorganized thoughts and notes as we go along has made report-writing a lot less painful (not pain-LESS, but better all the same).
Further, if you're already in the Mediawiki world, you might want to look at SemanticMediawiki. It allows you to take the organization of your data to another level by semantically tagging it. That doesn't mean a lot on its own, I know, but I can tell you (for example) that it can drastically improve the relevance of the data returned from searches. It is definitely worth a look.

Generally good advice here. I'd like to add:
You really need a champion - someone pushing this to developers and management (without being pushy - that's a challenge!) and providing support & tutorials when possible. This person also needs to be a peer (so a fellow developer, not someone in a remote IT department) and really customer focused i.e. ready to make changes when requested.
Speaking of changes, some people here say wikis are unstructured. I disagree. Our MediaWiki installation is structured using categories, particularly with two extensions:WarnNoCategories (to require users to add a category when saving a page) and CategoryTree to show how all the categories fit together (this can be linked to from the sidebar). I've got more tips on how we keep this low threshold, if you're interested.