Issue

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

An Issue is a problem or requirement of work needing to be done. Usually it is related to a particular project and organisation. Issues are resolved by roles performing activities on them. See the raise an issue procedure for help on how to use issues.

Example sequence of issues and activities

Initially an issue may be raised from any number of ways, for example an emailed enquiry or form on the site, or maybe directly by one of the staff or wiki users creating a new Issue record. Sometimes issues are created automatically in response to notification of an important system event such as a failed backup.

The next step is for the people who may potentially deal with the Issue to be able to see it. This is done by the usual wiki way of watching articles and categories so that the issues that a partcular role should work on are emailed to them and are in lists on their user page and their various work portal pages. The image below shows a typical email received in this way, the highlighted area is the Issue name and serves as a short description (click on the image for a clearer view).

Alternatively, issues relating to a user are available from their user page or other specific portals in the wiki. This image shows a typical wiki organisation user page with a number of prioritised outstanding issues.

After selecting an issue to begin doing some work on, the user can see all the relevant information on the issue's current state at the top, then below that is a list of activities that have already been performed on this issue, including a red link allowing the creation of a new activity for this issue after the current work session is done.

Apart from these things at the top, the record is a normal article and can have arbitrary related content appended by editing as usual, all the normal discussion and history options are available for proceeding with normal collaboration. To change the properties of the issue, however, it is easiest to click the "edit with form" link which produces the view shown in the right hand picture.

After some work has been carried out on the issue, an activity record can be created to account for the time. Depending on the context within which the activity is created, various fields may already be filled out. For example, clicking on the red link in the above picture results in the following activity form, which already has the Organisation, Project, Issue and Person fields populated.

Activities can be carried out in this manner and can eventually be compiled into a worklog for invoicing particular organisations for specified periods of work, as shown in the following picture. Note that this worklog article is made purely in wikitext; its form elements and functionality can all be discussed and refined through collaboration in the wiki, no PHP code is required to create such custom reports.

Fields in an Issue record

ID: Issues use common-sense short descriptions for their identities

Project:

Organisation:

Description:

Status:

Priority: Accepts values from "1-Urgent" to "4-Low". The leading number allows table columns that contain this field to be sortable.

AssignedTo:

Attention: The value of this field is of type Person and should be set to the person from whom the issue requires attention before it can continue.

Solution: A description of the solution if the issue has been resolved. This should include links to diff's, resources or discussion carried out during its solution. Note that the issues lists in user pages and roles portals will not consider an issue resolved if the Solution field is empty.