Mantis – Task Management Tool!!

In my current project we use Mantis as bug tracking tool as well as customized it to use as Task management tool. My project is more of maintenance and up-gradation types. We have to redesign the older files and templates and add new functionality as new integration comes in play.

We needed open source tool to track our daily progress of work. Hence the best strategy comes out to be Task based assignment of work to resource. Mantis was introduced to us for monitoring the task and bug tracking tool.

As the project grows in size we tweaked Mantis as per our needs. Following are the steps where we use Mantis.

Admin is your client.

1. Admin creates new Tickets for every Task.
2. Admin identify if it can be “Parent-of” or “child-of” kind relationship exists within the tickets already created.
3. Now this ticket is published to Developers.
4. Developers as per their bucket size assign the tickets to themselves.
5. Now, in Mantis you can set various level of status, priority and severity.
6. Status, Priority and severity can be defined by you – you need to tweak it. …. How …Drop in your comments with your query.
7. The Task status is set to “Analysis” .This is a state where Developers write their checklist about their understanding of Task.
8. Developers can post the Queries or understanding in notes and assign back to Admin to review and respond.
9. Once freezed, Task status is set to “Under development” development notes are posted as progress made.
10. Once development is finished Task enters in “Testing Phase” and status is set to “in-house testing” and assign to Tester.
11. Tester can revert back to Developers setting status to “Development” with bug list updated in the note OR If no bugs found can assign to Admin for Testing
12. Admin Either Revert the change or Approve the built.
13. Accordingly action is taken and Task is Either “Closed” or “Closed by feedback”.
14. Once closed it is modified with closing information about the Task .Like
a. Files created
b. Files modified
c. Sql statement
d. Config vars etc

At any point of time Mantis provide reports to stack holders of project. In every Task detail you can see a short-summary where in which action in sequence can be found and it give quick info about task progress.

Mantis help us in maintaining Process in project ….how …wait for my second post .

Till then explore Mantis and drop your queries or comments.