Howdy,

Can anyone suggest a product that will allow a developer to raise a ticket (or similar sort of trackable item) which can be used to track the progress of a software build through a number of environments? Basically It's just a case of creating a ticket, using that to trigger a software build, then requiring some form of sign off to allow a second stage, and then another sign off for a third. It's not about building things, just tracking an issue through various stages of testing through to production.

I'm looking at replacing an environment which currently uses jira for this purpose, but I've no knowledge of it, and am keen on other GPL tools instead. Jira is, as a product, massively overkill for what is required too. So I'm keen on one which might fit in with the rest of my toolset - cobbler, func, puppet etc. I was looking at trac, which seems like it might have some relevant angles to it, but I really can't tell because having not done this sort of project before I don't honestly know what to call what i'm after. I don't *think* that something like bugzilla would be appropriate as it's too specifically about bug tracking, rather than a generic workflow with signoff stages and such.

Any thoughts?

TRAC is pretty flexible; has a lot of plugins. Also you can do TRAC + Agilo Free and get a pretty powerful solution.

Well this is within Agile, so Agilo might be wroth looking into. I'm just very green on ticket management and workflow stuff. I've been playing with trac this morning and am beginning to see where it would fit in, it seems that it's mostly just a case of replacing a lot of the terminology from the language of bug fixing and feature enhancements to testing phases and environments, hopefully we're onto a winner with trac.

Hey, we used to use rocks back in the early 90's....seriously.....

Whatever you wind up with, you're in better shape. And on a Jira-related note, we've written plug-ins for Jira to accomplish what you're after. We've had good luck with it, and while it IS overkill, it does give you a lot of room to grow.

I've only used Trac and can only speak on behalf of it. However it seems both would be able to handle what the goal is. If you have the time why not try them both and give us a review of which worked better for you?

nomb

Remedy is a pretty fully featured system, though it isn't free in any sense of the word. I have seen it used on sites I've worked at and it's good for Incidents, IMACs, change and resource management.

You might also want to check out Redmine. We have a bunch of developers who are jumping to it http://www.redmine.org/

Disregard that "easy" part, now I am looking at http://bitnami.org/stack/redmine to get it running. Hopefully easier.

You can stick anything with BMC written on it right up your arse... But thanks for the suggestion!

Looks like that could be worth a spin. Not much use being in Ubuntu repos when I'm running a CentOS environment though!

If you want to liven up the office, you could integrate this too:

http://www.pragmaticautomation.com/c...InTrouble.rdoc

That is silly.

I never said it was enjoyable, just that it works

hate hate hate hate. It would be far too large a project to implement for just little old me either way though. We have very simple requirements, just specific ones, and a proper enterprise grade tool would never work just to automate some VM installations.