David's Tech Blog

Over the years I have worked with a number of ticket systems. They can generally be grouped like this:

• Systems that are designed for support requests (Request Tracker, many commercial helpdesk products)
• Systems that are designed to track bug and feature requests for software development projects (bugtraq, eventum, mantis)
• Systems for projects that emphasize stuff that management wants but don’t really help with actually getting work done.

Quite a few of the bug tracking systems lack user friendly features needed by support departments. Many of the nicer helpdesk products lack basic funcationality needed to track tasks. I haven’t found any products that really do what I want to do with them. What I want them to do is treat tasks like they are tasks, and give them workflows depending on their type but still keep my task lists completely integrated as “the things I’m supposed to do today and over the next two weeks”.

I’m mostly convinced that even as common as these systems are, there is money to be made in developing a system that tracks tasks in a way that supports the variety of different activities that IT departments and other support and development teams regularly do. It basically needs to treat tasks as tasks, and let you manage them with customizable workflows depending on whether they are support or development or recurring kinds of tasks. And it needs to do it without making everybody feel like they are working with software developed by a perl programmer.