[rt-users] Difference between Parent/Child and Depends on/Depended on by?

[Kenneth Crocker]

Richard,


	Actually, I've NEVER been able to resolve a parent ticket without all 
the children tickets being resolved first. Because of the way the LINKS 
table works, I can have a child ticket ALSO be a "DependedOnBy" ticket 
as well, although I'm not sure that is required. I even remember someone 
on the list having written a scrip that checks all dependencies, 
parents, etc and when the last dependency for a parent is resolved, the 
parent is automatically resolved as well.
	As to automatic sanity, I created a query to run whenever I go to the 
home page that lists all non-resolved tickets and all the 
dependencies/children as well as the Custom Fields that shows their 
"Work-Status" (In Progress, Unit Testing, system Testing, etc.), Due 
date, TIme Left, priorities, owners, etc. SO whenever I need to see 
what's up, I just go to my home page. No sweat!
	I don't need departments because each of our support queues works for 
one department. We have over 115 support Queues and each queue has one 
manager (AdminCc) and 1 support group (techies) and 1 User group as well 
as a few other groups allowed to participate in either a consulting or 
watching role. We let the Queue Manager (AdminCc) manage who is allowed 
to access their queue.
	Not only is all our project management of each project done with RT, 
but we have our own Approval Queues set up with new Ticket Statuses like 
"pending rv", "rq approvd" for review and approval before we move it to 
the appropriate support queue. We have an entire User guide to show our 
users how to use this infrastructure as well as a "Queue Admin" guide to 
show our Queue managers how to manage their queues and the privileges 
they have and how to use them. Because of the nature of our 
infrastructure for software support, we also have Ticket Statuses of 
"pending qa" and "qa approvd" for our QA/User Acceptance testing 
procedures as well as scrips to ensure that the developer does NOT 
approve their own work. I also created a "Glossary of Terms", "Rights 
Dictionary", and "Data Dictionary" as tools for management of RT. We 
have no loss of "AUTOMATIC SANITY". Hope this helps.


Kenn
LBNL

On 9/23/2008 4:11 AM, Richard Hartmann wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 19:07, Kenneth Crocker <KFCrocker at lbl.gov> wrote:
> 
>>        We use the Parent/Child and DependsOn relationships a great deal and
>> this is how we do it. Whenever we have a ticket that in and of itself causes
>> other work to be done within the SAME support group for the same queue, we
>> make those tickets "Children" tickets of the main/original request ticket.
> [...]
>> This allows us to create spreadsheet that becomes a project management
>> report.
> 
> Thanks for taking the time to explain your process. It seems to me that you
> are mainly using parent/child vs depends for management purposes, i.e. to
> show which business unit did what.
> You do this at the loss of automatic sanity checking (i.e. forcing the large
> ticket to stay open until all subtickets have been closed), but from how you
> write, I assume it's working nicely, for you.
> 
> 
> I still can't see the advantage in this scheme (for example, you could use
> depends and another CF that holds the name of the department), but as
> I said, I may simply think about this the wrong way and/or just work
> differently.
> 
> 
> Again, thanks for your mail,
> Richard
>