Newbie to Open Source development - General discussion

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Forum General General discuss... Newbie to Open Source development

10/8/2008 3:26 AM

	cquinn
2 posts

Newbie to Open Source development

Hi guys

Firstly, I'd like to congratulate the BugNet community on an excellent product.

I'm working for an organistaion of about 200 employees and I've been tasked with developing a helpdesk/trouble ticket issuing system for all areas of the business - HR, Facilities, IT and Engineering. Having looked into a few solutions currently out there - BugZilla, Jira, BugTracker.NET I've decided that BugNet is the best for our needs (main benefit being it's clean interface design).

However, I'm aware that in order for me to get the application into a workable system for our business it will take quite a bit of customisation (presentation layer, business layer and database). As this is my first time working with open source software I was wondering how this would affect any future upgrades, patches etc. (My initial hunch is that we wouldn't be able to without great difficulty in merging changes).

Has anyone out there used BugNET as a helpdesk/trouble ticket issuing system for business areas outside of software development and can they share some of their experiences?

Charlie

10/9/2008 7:07 AM

Accepted Answer

	admin
658 posts
bugnetproject.com

Re: Newbie to Open Source development

cquinn wrote

Hi guys

Firstly, I'd like to congratulate the BugNet community on an excellent product.

I'm working for an organistaion of about 200 employees and I've been tasked with developing a helpdesk/trouble ticket issuing system for all areas of the business - HR, Facilities, IT and Engineering. Having looked into a few solutions currently out there - BugZilla, Jira, BugTracker.NET I've decided that BugNet is the best for our needs (main benefit being it's clean interface design).

However, I'm aware that in order for me to get the application into a workable system for our business it will take quite a bit of customisation (presentation layer, business layer and database). As this is my first time working with open source software I was wondering how this would affect any future upgrades, patches etc. (My initial hunch is that we wouldn't be able to without great difficulty in merging changes).

Has anyone out there used BugNET as a helpdesk/trouble ticket issuing system for business areas outside of software development and can they share some of their experiences?

Charlie

Depending on your timelines you may wish to check out the 0.8 preview release. It is still in development, and very shaky at the momement, but is far more customizable than the 0.7 releases and may save you a lot of time. One of the goals of the 0.8 release is to remove any hard coding of values and allow the users to configure pretty much every value in the application.

Any changes you do to a released version would affect future upgrades unless yoru changes can be applied to the whole application as patches. This means that the changes would have to be beneficial to everyone and not specific custom functionality that you wish to implement.

Davin Dubeau
BugNET - Core Developer

10/9/2008 8:02 AM

	smoss
114 posts
www.orbitsolutions.co.za

Re: Newbie to Open Source development

Modified By smoss on 10/9/2008 9:58:43 AM)

Hi Charlie,

In ASP.NET you might be able to get away with customizing the design of the masterpage.

Just make sure that this file is not overwritten in new versions. However you might have to manually merge tags from the new version into your custom version (for example if you are migrating from 0.7 to 0.8).

On a seperate issue, our organization uses BugNET to track non software development projects. The customers really like this. The only thing different is we used the "version" field to list customer names. The categories etc as per normal.

I tried adding a custom Attribute to the project but found I could not get the reporting I needed.

One more thing is we added our own status and prorities types. You need to turn off autonumbering on the affected tables in the database. Then just add your new ones.

EG: "100=Assembled", "101=QC", "102=Distribution" etc...

It worked fine, and even subsequent upgrades from lower versions of 0.7 have not broken anything.

Beware I am not sure if Davin will write an upgrade path for these custom status fields when it comes to 0.8! (its probably not worth it, since only three users have done this so far)

Also these new status fields are system wide, on 0.8 they are project specific.

10/13/2008 9:40 AM

	cquinn
2 posts

Re: Newbie to Open Source development

Thanks for your comments

Version 0.8 does seem perfect for my requirements however I do not have the timeline to be able to wait for this release. I think the plan of action will be to use the latest version 0.7.921 and incorporate the changes I require (using smoss' suggestion for updating status and priority types) knowing that any future upgrade will not be compatible with the changes I've made.

I look forward to contributing to this project in my own personal and working time.

Charlie

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