15 November 2006 | Product | oDesk Marketing

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. 
If the above doesn’t leave you very excited let me give you a bit of background information. 

Bugzilla and how it  is integrated with the oDesk service

 
Bugzilla, http://www.bugzilla.org, is one of the most popular open source application that according to its authors is “…designed to help you manage software development“. It has proven its effectiveness by being used in some of the most successful open source projects like Mozilla etc. It is perfectly suited for distributed groups of individuals that work in different time zones and do not have the luxury of continuous “synchronous” communication (talk/chat).  It is the application that we ourselves are using to manage our engineering team comprised of 5 local and 20 remote oDesk providers spread across 5 time zones. 
 
So far the integration that we offered between our application and bugzilla is mostly about single sign-on and auto-provisioning. At assignment start we automatically add the provider’s account to the list of users that can access the Bugzilla database of the buyer. Ending the assignment automatically disables the provider’s account from accessing the database as well as receiving any further bugzilla email notifications. Both the console of the buyer, the provider, and any other buyer company user provide links to the corresponding bugzilla database. After login in you can access bugzilla either through the links in the application home page or by directly going to the bugzilla top level URL : https://secure.odesk.com/bugzilla. 
The bugzilla application we are running is based on the 2.16.1 version ( we will be soon upgrading to 2.20). Its minor differences from the standard bugzilla can be seen here : the most important one is the ability to switch between multiple company accounts, particularly useful for providers with multiple assignments.  
 
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.

 
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