[pmwiki-users] using PITS as a project manager

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Feb 7 23:57:06 CST 2005


On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 11:26:18PM -0600, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 06:02:12PM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
> > I think a good test would be to choose one of the several suggested
> > uses and set up a form for it. So let's identify candidates and then
> > pick one. 
> > [...]
> > The candidate needs to be simple enough to be manageable and rich
> > enough to exercise the capabilities. 
> 
> What about re-implementing PITS?

Here's a candidate: how about figuring out how to handle PmWiki's
FAQ document, or developing a way to index FAQ and PITS entries together
and still make sense of them?  

Take a look at http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/FAQ and you can 
see that it somehow "doesn't work".  One problem is that with all of the
questions combined it's not easy for an inquirer (or respondent)
to easily track individual questions.  Tracking items is what PITS
is good at, but the current PITS form isn't situated around supporting
a FAQ.

This is also mentioned in PITS #00204.

For *real* bonus points, the system ought to be able to integrate issue
tracking, FAQ documents, *and* the cookbook.  Right now that integration
takes place via the pmwiki-users mailing list, but the problem with the
mailing list is that there's not a good way to attach a status (open,
awaiting feedback, closed, assigned to XYZ) or identifier to a thread.

> > However, changing the template will seriously break editing of
> > existing records.
> 
> You could add button that, when clicked, causes the template to become
> immutable without some extraordinary action. That would at least
> mitigate people shooting themselves in the foot.

Somehow I think it's more important to find a way such that templates
can be changed -- it's unrealistic to expect that people will get the
template right the first time, or that templates won't need to evolve over
time.  (BTW, the implementation of PITS is such that changing the
template wouldn't break things.)

Pm



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