[rt-users] Additional statuses possible?

[Thomas Pfau]

I just installed RT 3.0.10 to use with a friend for a website we 
maintain.  It looks like it should help us coordinate reported problems 
a lot better and keep our inboxes cleaner.  We've been sending mail 
messages back and forth to annotate bugs.  Trying to find the mail 
message with the discussion of the issue currently being worked on had 
become impossible with an inbox overflowing with several messages for 
each issue (mostly new feature requests).

With that said, it has become apparent that a couple more statuses would 
be nice.  I haven't yet had the chance to look into the code to see what 
it would take but thought I'd ask here anyway.

I worked for a startup for a while that used a different issue tracking 
package.  I can't remember it's name but I remember it had a few 
additional statuses.  Right off the bat I can think of two that would be 
useful.

The first would come between 'new' and 'open'.  I would call this 
'assigned'.  This would state that a person has been assigned to the 
issue but work has not started on it yet.  I guess this can be deduced 
in the current system by looking at new tickets that had owners but a 
specific status might come in handy for searching and reporting.  
Another status in this general area would be 'acknowledged' which would 
indicate that someone has reviewed the issue reported and has determined 
that it is a real issue that needs someone's attention.

The other status would fall between 'open' and 'resolved'.  This status, 
possibly called 'completed', would indicate that work had been completed 
and was awaiting Q/A testing or signoff by the requestor.  This state 
tells the requestor that the person working the ticket thinks he has 
completed the task.  If the requestor agrees, he (or some other 
reviewer) can move the ticket to the next state.  Otherwise, he can log 
a reason why he thinks it needs more work and reopen the ticket.  This 
extra status would help us out quite a bit.  There is a third person 
working with us who would act as a Q/A person to make sure the issues 
were resolved before we marked the ticket as 'resolved' (at which point 
it sort of falls out of sight).  It would be great if he could just 
search for 'completed' tickets and run his tests to make sure they are 
resolved.

How hard would it be to add these statuses to the system?

-- 
tom_p
pfau at nbpfaus.net -- http://nbpfaus.net/~pfau/