No anonymous bug-report posting?

lzandman · Post by **lzandman** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 4:32 pm

Hi,

Today I installed Dragnet and had a quick look around. Although I didn't yet have the time to look at it thoroughly, I did notice one thing immediately. It looks like it is not possible for arbitrary users of our software to report a bug (anonymously). Is this true?

What I want is for (anonymous) people to submit bug reports for some of our projects. I would want them to be able to submit new bugs reports, but obviously not be able to change the bug's status (because that's what developers and admin should do). I only saw three security levels (read/modify/administer). For users to be able to add a new bug report they have to have modify access privileges. But this also enables them to change the status of the bugs, which is something you don't want them to be able to do.

Am I right or did I miss something? If it isn't possible is there going to be any solution for this?

I'd also like Dragnet to be a web service, just like Vault. That way I could build my own client applications for it.

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 10:14 pm

What I want is for (anonymous) people to submit bug reports for some of our projects.

This functionality is available in Dragnet 1.0.1.

If you would like to allow external users to submit items for a particular project, enable the Allow External Submissions options from Modify Project page.

When this option is enabled, each project’s item tracking section will include an External Add page. If you provide users with the URL for the external Add Item page, users not in the Dragnet system can use the form add items to Dragnet.

When a user not in the Dragnet system adds an item, “external-user” will be entered for the reporter value. Note that the username for this user can be configured from the Modify User page.

I'd also like Dragnet to be a web service, just like Vault.

Dragnet is a web service. You can see the web methods documentation if you use this URL in your browser:

http://<yourdragnetserver>.sourcegear.com/Dragnet/dragnetwebservice.asmx

lzandman · Post by **lzandman** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 3:44 am

lbauer wrote: Dragnet is a web service. You can see the web methods documentation if you use this URL in your browser:

http://<yourDragnetserver/dragnetwebservice.asmx

Oh, I didn't know that

I'll check it out.

One more question: I assume SourceGear uses Dragnet themselves to track bugs in Vault and Dragnet etc. Why can't I report bugs found in your software directly into your Dragnet DB? As far as I know I can only report bugs in this forum. I would expect you to use your own software for this.

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 4:37 pm

It's not a bad idea to have users input bugs into Dragnet. We'd probably want to keep it separate from the database or projects used by our developers, though.

Before we log a bug to our bug/features database, we try to replicate it in-house and work with the user to be sure it's not a usage error. We also want to avoid duplicates.

The benefit of reporting bugs to a public forum is that the information is immediately available to any user. Sometimes users have come up with solutions to problems that have stumped us.

We keep track of who has reported bugs or feature requests so we can follow-up once there's a resolution.

If other Vault/SOS/Dragnet users would like to report bugs via Dragnet, let us know and we'll look into this further.

lzandman · Post by **lzandman** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 6:02 pm

lbauer wrote: The benefit of reporting bugs to a public forum is that the information is immediately available to any user. Sometimes users have come up with solutions to problems that have stumped us.

OK, I understand that. But most bug tracking systems that I have experience with allow for reported bugs to be publicly viewed and commented on, so it is immediately available. I currently use an open-source bug tracker called Mantis that supports this kind of behaviour. Also Mozilla.org's Bugzilla offers this. I saw Dragnet also supports the addition of comments to bug reports, so if users come up with a solutions to problems they can add it to the actual bug report itself. Then there wouldn't be any need to use the forum.

Currently it's pretty difficult to get a list of all (confirmed) bugs in your software. The support forum not only contains bug reports, but also other support discussions. You can't easily filter out the bug reports. Using bug tracking software it would be a lot easier to review all bugs and see their status.

And again I'd like to point out that I find it kind of weird that SourceGear, as a developer of the Dragnet bug tracking system, doesn't publicly use it to track bugs for their own products.

ericsink · Post by **ericsink** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 3:03 pm

lzandman wrote:And again I'd like to point out that I find it kind of weird that SourceGear, as a developer of the Dragnet bug tracking system, doesn't publicly use it to track bugs for their own products.

Why is that so weird? How many other ISVs expose their bug-tracking database to the public? The contents of our bug database are confidential. We use it as the primary tool for managing what each person on our team is doing. I like transparency, but we're not planning to make every gory detail of our management process publicly visible.

Even though we won't make our bug database publicly viewable, at some point we may set things up so that our customers can enter new items. Right now, the primary thing blocking that is inertia. We are perhaps a little bit set in our ways. Our standard process hasn't changed much in years. I'm not sure we're ready to have our primary management tool filled with external submissions intermingled with our own items.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 5:35 pm

ericsink wrote:The contents of our bug database are confidential. We use it as the primary tool for managing what each person on our team is doing. I like transparency, but we're not planning to make every gory detail of our management process publicly visible.

OK, that's fair. But what I meant was that I would expect a developer of a certain piece of software to also show that they use the software themselves. Kinda like Microsoft using their Windows Server platform for hosting their own websites (although I remember Hotmail being run on BSD unix systems for increased stability

)

Anyway, the main reason for starting this thread was that I wanted a way for persons to be able to add a bug to the system, without being able to change bug status/priority etc.

ericsink · Post by **ericsink** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 8:22 am

Anonymous wrote:But what I meant was that I would expect a developer of a certain piece of software to also show that they use the software themselves.

Acknowledged, and on this point we completely agree.

We currently use every product we make, but we don't use every feature of every product. But to do so would be a worthwhile goal.