Multiple assignees (developer, reviewer, tester) for tickets in Trac

Question

We are reworking on our workflow and looking for options between jira and trac. We are all comfortable with Trac but have following questions:

1. What we want is each ticket have 3 people responsible. One developing it, another reviewing it and the third person testing it. We want some advance options that same person cant develop and review / test the ticket.

2. We want a separate cycle for these three people. Once developed and finished, it goes to the reviewer and tester automatically. They individually can take their set of actions and once it has been approved by both reviewer and tested, it goes to the next stage. Is this workflow possible with Trac. If yes, how should I go about it

Thanks Sparsh Gupta

Answer 1

You can do this with Trac (a team at my company does something similar), but it will take some configuration work.

First, you need the ability to assign three people to a ticket. To do this, add custom ticket fields (type 'text') with names like "Reviewer" and "Tester". These will be used to store the names of the non-developers assigned to the ticket.

You'll also want to add a new state to Trac's ticket workflow to represent the state where testing and reviewing is being done. For the sake of discussion, I'll call this state "verification". Insert this state in the workflow such that a ticket travels from assigned/accepted --> verification --> closed.

You will also need some way for the tester and reviewer to indicate that they have signed off on the changes. For this, you can add two more custom fields (of type "checkbox") to the ticket. You can call these "Review Complete" and "Test Complete". These tickets will default to unchecked and the tester/reviewer will check them once they have successfully completed their test/review work.

That should get you started as far as the workflow goes. Regarding some of the more advanced parts of your question, you have a couple of options.

You can add a bit of custom javascript that will prevent a user from being listed in multiple owner fields. The javascript would run whenever the owner, reviewer, or tester field is modified. If the new value in that field matches the value in one of the other two fields, the other field will be cleared out. Instead of writing custom Javascript, one of the following plugins may be able to do this for you:

• DynamicFieldsPlugin
• TicketValidatorPlugin
• TicketSubmitPolicyPlugin

Answer 2

With Trac's configurable workflow this could be possible (depending on how much flexibility you need). Basically you can set side-effects when the status is changed (e.g. change the assignee).

Answer 3

I think this is a difficult problem independent of the tool you want to use. The reasons are:

• If 3 people are responsible (at the same time), how does each person know when he is expected something to do?
• If the 3 people are responsible depending on the workflow, how do you configure which person is responsible when?
• You have to integrate that in the workflow and nor JIRA or Trac can do that out-of-the-box.

A possible solution could be (and no, I don't implement it for you :-):

1. Define the workflow with states and transitions.
2. Define the fields developing assignee, review assignee and test assignee.
3. Define in your workflow at which transition the real assignee is switched from develop to review to test.

And yes, that is complicated and not easy to implement. But it could be worth if you use that hundreds of times each day. Else, an organizational solution would be sufficient where one assignee changes to the next one when triggering the transitions.