Nagging Issue Tracker 8

Posted by yrashk

I was thinking about issue tracking a lot for last few weeks. There are a lot of free, commercial and hosted software options that let you track your issues in this or that way. Some of the popular choices are Trac, RT, JIRA and Basecamp.

Though as far as I understand all these solutions, they are pretty passive, just like most of web applications. They are just issue databases with notification capabilities. And that made me to think in a somewhat different way.

Please note that may be I’ve just missed something that is already implemented this way and just re-inventing a wheel

So, what I am talking about? Why I’ve said that solutions I know are passive?

Well, actually—what these solutions are doing? They allow you to collect issues, update them and get notifications about changes made. Basically, that’s all. It’s pretty straightforward, works for numerous companies and individuals, but… the problem is that I’m not very self-disciplined, I’m rather enthusiast, and I could easily lose a focus and finally have problems with own daily or weekly or monthly (yikes!) plan. And as far as I can see, I’m not that alone.

So I came to a simple idea of so called nagging issue tracker (nagit). What it is about? What purpose should it serve? An idea is very simple, really:

  • nagit splits assigned issues into session chunks: rightnow (tasks to be done just now, in a few hours term), today (tasks to be done today), thisweek, thismonth, thisyear.
  • Once you have assigned tasks in a rightnow chunk, it’s your current chunk. When you’re done with them, today chunk is your current one, and so on.
  • nagit should not allow you to view (or at least it should complicate access and make any changes impossible) for any assigned task that is not planned for the current chunk.
  • nagit should nag you via popups, email, IM, SMS, headache stimulator about current session’s tasks quite frequent. Frequency should be calculated using some task’s weight formula, something like:

    weight(task) = (task.chunk.length_in_seconds-task.chunk.time_left_in_seconds) / task.chunk.length_in_seconds *  task.importance
,

where weight and task.importance are in (0..1). If weight is higher, then nagit should remind you about this assignment more frequently.

So. Maybe you’ve got an idea. It’s still a bit rough, but it’s a concept, not a real car (YET!).

Yes, it looks that nagit is a quite aggressive application. But what if it will help me and some of you to focus on your plan (and then, get rich, happy and healthy)?

/me is experimenting with mockups.