Did You Mean? for Redmine
Did You Mean? is a Redmine plugin I wrote with Mattia to warn users before they enter duplicate issues, in an attempt to mitigate issue tracker misuse. It was inspired by the way Stack Overflow handles the insertion of duplicate questions.
The plugin is designed to warn users before they enter duplicate issues and it does so by performing a search among the existing items right before users submit new ones. Search is based on the issue subject and it is done in the background, in an attempt to make the process as effortless as possible to users.
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Alessandro Bahgat
Software Engineer & Manager
I am an engineer and manager of engineers, I sometimes play with side projects and write about my experiences in my spare time.
Posts
Preventing (some) duplicate bug reports in Redmine
A while ago I wrote about a few problems we were having with the way our issue tracker was misused and concluded that the tools we use have a crucial role in directing our behavior towards good or bad behavior patterns.
One of the major pain points I mentioned was linked to the many duplicate issues we were seeing and listed one possible solution to reduce the number of duplicate issues that were being raised. After reading my post, my friend Mattia came to me saying “Good point, why don’t we just build it?“. Well, we did.
We need smarter issue trackers
While issue trackers originate as tools to manage projects more effectively, during the last years of work I have been through some situations where their misuse backfired.
Tools originally conceived to improve workflows and project lifecycle became a significant burden for the team using them, occasionally making difficult situations even worse.
This post is a collection of bad patterns I have seen happening. It is not a survey of all the possible situations that can occur. It is not meant to be an argument against issue trackers (if it tells anything, it will probably be about the teams I was part of), but rather an overview of things that went wrong because of the way a particular team used those systems.
In retrospective, most of the problems were due to a lack of discipline and experience of the project teams, and they are less frequent – if present – in a team of seasoned professionals. But, while training and education can certainly help, I would love to consider a different aspect: the issue tracking systems were not helping as they could have.
