Issue Track­ing Sys­tem

Glossary term descrip­tion
  • Also known as
  • Issue Manager/
  • Ticket System

An issue track­ing sys­tem is a soft­ware appli­ca­tion that allows to record and fol­low the progress of "tick­ets" or "issues" from their time of cre­ation until they are resolved.

An issue track­ing sys­tem gen­er­ally pro­vides its users with a way to report an issue and track pro­gres­sion towards its res­o­lu­tion. Issues tracked can be any­thing from a sim­ple cus­tomer ques­tion, over detailed tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions and to-do lists, to reports of errors or bugs . Com­mon issue types are:

  • Tasks
    Tasks describe small pieces of work that have to be done.
  • Epics
    Epics describe the vision for a prod­uct. They are usu­ally used to col­lect ideas or make the team bet­ter under­stand the related use of the prod­uct.
  • User sto­ries
    User sto­ries describe the use case for a prod­uct from the users' point of view.
  • Change requests / Fea­ture requests
    Change requests or fea­ture requests state miss­ing fea­tures and pos­si­ble improve­ments of a prod­uct. They usu­ally allow for addi­tional eval­u­a­tion of their impor­tance by the stake­hold­ers (vot­ing).
  • Support requests
    Support requests ask for help with using a prod­uct or ser­vice.
  • Bug reports
    Bug reports describe mal­func­tions of a prod­uct.

Addi­tional infor­ma­tion may be attached to an issue. For exam­ple, some issues may have a pri­or­ity, an issue state, an assigned owner of the issue, file attach­ments, an issue sever­ity and steps to repro­duce for bug reports, or some other cus­tomized infor­ma­tion as busi­ness value, time spent, com­ments and so on.

Fur­ther­more, most issue track­ing sys­tems pro­vide the abil­ity to setup issue work­flows. An issue ticket may have states as "new", "inves­ti­gat­ing", "being worked on", "test­ing", "done", and alike. These states tran­si­tion dur­ing the work along the defined work­flows. This ensures the team to focus on a cer­tain ticket till it is really done, not acci­den­tally miss­ing any step, and all its work done being asso­ci­ated with a trace­able his­tory.

Issue track­ing sys­tems are used by many kinds of enter­prises, includ­ing soft­ware devel­op­ers, man­u­fac­tur­ers, IT help desks, and other ser­vice providers.

When every stake­holder can access the issue track­ing sys­tem and there­fore always knows who is respon­si­ble for resolv­ing cer­tain issues and what has been done so far, it allows for a high level of trans­parency. Infor­ma­tion can be shared smoothly with every­one involved.

The issue track­ing sys­tem used by SHORELESS is called SHORELESS TIM and is avail­able at https://tim.shore­less.lim­ited.

It allows for fil­ing Support Requests, Fea­ture Requests, Change Requests, Bug Reports and Tasks. And as SHORELESS is using Ticket Dri­ven Devel­op­ment for most of its work, SHORELESS TIM is at the heart of all our work­flows.