Case: planning / item tracking / hours declaration

[jsiegmund]

Hi,

Untill this day we've never really used the item tracking possibilities of Fortress. We did try a few projects where we created milestones and items to check code into. This works fine, but I wondered if it's possible to extend the functionality a bit.

Apart from Fortress, we also use a webbased application to log our activities during the day. Now I want to combine those to, to get insight in how our development team is doing. I'm planning of altering the web application to include a work item number in each logged activity. That way I could compare the actual spent time to the time planned on an item, and use that data to generate reports on a projects status (hours planned, hours spent, hours left).

Now while I was at it, I thought about something else; planning the project. At this point, we can use fortress to create milestones and set the goal date. For items, we can't set any dates if I'm not mistaken? For this to work I would need to be able to track things like:
- Milestone: planned start date, planned end date, actual start date (could be calculated by the first planned item date), actual end date (could be calculated when the last item is set to a 'closed' state).
- Item: planned time (the current functionality isn't suffice: we need to be able to enter a number of hours as an int or double), planned start date, planned end date, actual start date (first check-in on this item), end date (the date the item is set to status closed)

With this data, we could combine the actual time declarations made in hour own web app with the data from Fortress to produce very detailed reports on how a project is doing and how our overall performance is. The changes to the item / milestone objects aren't that complicated so I was wondering whether something like this is possible.


If you guys are interested, please let me know what options we have to extend Fortress to fit our needs (and perhaps the needs of others too!).

[lbauer]

Your ideas are quite interesting and certainly users would find additional project tracking features helpful. However in the current version, there really aren't many options for extending Fortress. For instance you can't put a due date or planned start date on bugs.

[jsiegmund]

But you do have 'custom fields' function. What I would like to post as a feature request: being able to create our own custom fields with a custom name and specified type. That way I could create the fields I need with the correct datatypes (int, datetime). The interface would have to be dynamic to show those extra fields when inserting / editing / viewing an item or milestone. According to the specified datatype the interface should show a correct input field for text, numbers or datetime fields (and perhaps other datatypes).

With this functionality, all fortress users could extend their systems to fit their needs. I don't think we're the only team who could use such a thing, and I also believe (being an ASP.NET developer myself) this isn't that hard to implement.

If Fortress won't have this functionality, I'm going to create a subsystem myself to store these kinds of data. Some views over multiple SQL databases could combine the two and give me what I need, but it's not the most ideal solution if you ask me.

[lbauer]

We have feature request 13009 logged for additional custom fields. I've added your comments to the feature request info. We hope to have more custom fields in Fortress 2.0, due out later this year.

[jsiegmund]

"later this year"

Could you be a bit more specific? Like in: this summer, this fall or probably next winter?

[lbauer]

We haven't announced a release date yet, other than later this (calendar) year.