Feature launched: oDesk Team client and Bugzilla Integration

As many of our users already know every buyer account is auto-provisioned with an oDesk hosted Bugzilla application. Since Tuesday, all users that are using our bugzilla will get a nice surprise as they open the memo dialog of the Team client :

All the bugzilla tasks assigned to them will appear in the dialog box - selecting them auto-populates the memo with the corresponding bug number and description.

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With the Team-Bugzilla integration we are introducing the first elements of an integrated task/time management system.
The idea here is that an integrated task, time and billing service is able to provide the answer to key questions like:

• what is my team doing now , which tasks are they working on
• how much time my team has spent on each task, what is the ultimate cost of everything produced by my team.

By having real time answers to these questions a team is able to find its weaknesses, plan better and eventually improve its productivity.
How is this feasible?

How we use this feature to manage our own team

It is easier for me to describe the process that we are using to manage our own engineering team. You can use that as a template or adjust it to fit your needs.

1. Every team member can only bill time for assigned tasks.
   1. only memo annotated time is accepted
   2. the memos have to correspond to specific tasks assigned to that person
2. The manager of a team is responsible to create and assign tasks to its members. This is being done by creating tasks in bugzilla, adding related attributes (product, component, release, etc) , putting a detailed description of what needs to be done, ranking them with a priority and assigning them to the corresponding user.
3. Depending on the nature of the work some tasks are “recurring” (e.g., “Scan website logs for possible errors” ), and never finish, or they correspond to a specific outcome (e.g. “Update website home page according to attached spec”).
4. Team members accept tasks possibly updating the estimated completion. Assigned tasks appear in the Team client memo list and the provider can “bill time” for these tasks.
5. When tasks are complete the provider marks them as fixed and the task are automatically removed from the memo list.
6. The manager (or a separate user responsible for testing and verifying) can either verify the task or re-open it in which case it goes back to the queue of the provider. Throughout this work flow, bugzilla provides brief email notifications to the corresponding parties notifying them about changes, completions and availability of work.
7. The manager typically provides “back-burner” lower priority tasks for each member of their team so as they can switch to them instead of waiting for the manager’s reply after a task is being done.
8. The manager can create reports of hrs/$ spend by task or any of the other task attributes : E.g. Hrs/$ by product, Hrs/$ by release, Actual Cost vs Budget by Feature etc. Such reports can be done today manually using bugzilla report functionality and a bit of Excel. We will soon release additional reporting functionality to enhance the current timelogs with project/task costing etc.