issues tracking system

["Mark Little" <mark.little@arjuna.com>]

At the face-to-face it was agreed that I'd take a look at a couple of
potential ways of tracking issues against the various specifications and
make some recommendation for the TC to consider. During the meeting we
discussed the possibility of using bugzilla and I said I'd take a look at
another issue/bug tracking piece of software I'd experience with in the
past. That was jitterbug, but unfortunately that project is no longer
active.

I think we should consider bugzilla because it seems to offer what we want.
I'm more familiar with entering issues via the Web form, but there is an
email mechanism (apparently) that allows you to submit issues in a well
structured manner and the system will thread replies to them appropriately.
I have to admit that at this point I don't have any experience with the
email entry mechanism, and am only going by what little I have gleamed from
the manuals. However, I've asked a couple of people here in Arjuna to
investigate and hopefully I can report back to the TC later.

In the intrim, I'd like to formalise the proposal: that the TC consider
using bugzilla. We (Arjuna) will be happy to host and manage a public (to
the TC) bugzilla server for issue tracking. If this proposal is accepted,
then we'll set one up and populate it with some categories and components to
get us going. If people aren't too familiar with the bugzilla way of doing
things then don't worry - I will produce a brief document describing it, how
it is set up, with particular relevance to this TCs work (so you don't need
to understand all of what bugzilla actually offers). It will be configured
to email the TC whenever an issue is entered and people can track the issue
by virtue of an associated link. I need to do some further invesigation to
see whether we can produce a weekly "dump" of the issues that can perhaps be
hosted on the OASIS web site (e.g., a synopsis of the issues, their status
etc., with links back to the bugzilla site hosted at Arjuna for more
specific details).

Any suggestions on this topic will be greatly appreciated. Thanks to Doug
for showing me the XML that WS-RM currently use. Doug, as you said, this
looks good for a low-volume of issues. At this stage we can't really say
whether WS-CAF will have a low-volume or not and I think it's probably best
to start off defensively. I can't think of any disadvantage of going the
bugzilla route and it does look as though we can automate a lot of what we
need to do.

Mark.

----
Mark Little,
Chief Architect, Transactions,
Arjuna Technologies Ltd.

www.arjuna.com