StoryBoard - A task tracking system for inter-related projects

StoryBoard is the Django app (leveraging Bootstrap at the presentation layer) for task tracking across inter-related projects. It is meant to be suitable for OpenStack task tracking.

Features

At this stage, StoryBoard is just a proof-of-concept to see if it's worth investing more into developing it.

Current features

Bug tracking

Like Launchpad Bugs, StoryBoard implements bugs as stories, with tasks that may affect various project/series combinations. You can currently create bugs, tasks for bugs, edit their status, comment on them, etc. The current POC is incomplete: it does not do any sort of form client-side validation, and is missing search features, pagination, results ordering. This should definitely be improved if we go forward with this.

Project views

Basic project views that let you retrieve the list of tasks for a given project, as well as an example of a workflow-oriented view (the 'Triage bugs' view). The current POC is is also just a minimal stub of the project view feature set.

Markdown descriptions and comments

Story descriptions and comments can use markdown for richer interaction.

Questionable features

Some current design choices are questionable and open to discussion:

Priority is set for the whole story

Instead of each task having their own priority, the story itself has a priority. It makes triaging easier, however we may want to be able to have tasks with various priorities within a single story...

No invalid/wontfix/opinion status

We delete tasks rather than marking them invalid. On the benefits side, that means there is only one way to do it, on the drawbacks side you have to look into history to see if a given project task was considered and abandoned...

Future features

Feature tracking

The equivalent of Launchpad Blueprints, they inherit the same 'story' framework as bugs. That means they don't have most of the limitations of LP blueprints: you can comment in them, you can have tasks affecting multiple projects, you can even have multiple tasks affecting the same project and order them !

Project groups

Projects can be grouped together arbitrarily, and all 'project' views can be reused by project groups. That makes it easy to triage or track all tasks for projects within a given OpenStack program.

Subscription

Users should be able to subscribe to tasks (and get them in a specific view) as well as subscribe to projects (have their own customized project group). This lets you easily get customized views for the stuff that happens to matters to you, personally.

Gerrit integration

StoryBoard should reuse the projects and groups defined for Gerrit. It should reflect merges with deeper integration than with LP... potentially forcing a 1:1 relationship between tasks and merges (one merge = one task marked 'Landed')

Series tracking

A new tab for StoryBoard, giving you per-series and per-milestone views of progress. Would replace the need for status.o.o/releasestatus. Series and milestones could be specified per project, although having a default, common set would avoid duplication (and allow cross-project milestone views).

Story dependencies

Some stories relate to each other (duplicates, related, depend on...) and we should be able to access those easily.

Official tags

Currently all tags are considered custom (grey color). A set of official tags should be created (with associated colors and autocomplete magic) for easier reuse of popular tags.

Privileged actions

Currently everyone can do everything. Features prioritization, for example, should probably be restricted to PTL/drivers-style group.

Embargoed vulnerabilities support

Support for private stories that can be accessed only by a per-story set of users.

Patches in comments

Have the ability to attach patches to comments.

Email notifications

We'd certainly need email notifications of some kind, too.

Admin actions

Currently creating series/milestones/projects is done through the default Django admin app. StoryBoard could use something a bit more friendly.

Install, test and run

Prerequisites

You'll need the following Python modules installed:

• django (1.4+)
• django-openid-auth
• markdown
• python-openid

You can get them by running:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration and DB creation

Copy storyboard/local_settings.py.sample to storyboard/local_settings.py and change settings there.

Create empty database, create default admin user: ./manage.py syncdb

Basic test using Django development server

Run Django development server: ./manage.py runserver

Create basic data (at least a series, a milestone, a project) through the admin server (using the admin credentials above) at: http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/

Then log out and access the application at: http://127.0.0.1:8000/