One of our main goals and success factors at CollabNet is to listen carefully to our customers and prospects to understand your specific requirements. These requirements drive the development of new features within our products significantly. 

This blog post is a call for participation with two opportunities - An opportunity for us to listen to your needs, wishes and best practices and an opportunity for you to actively participate in our requirements engineering process.

For a research study focusing on improving the tracker workflow management features of SourceForge Enterprise Edition (SFEE), we developed a survey and a workflow extractor tool  to gather your current tracker workflow configuration and learn more about your needs.

The workflow configuration of a tracker defines its statuses, its permitted transitions between the statuses with their constraints (e. g. required fields and roles for a transition to happen) and its auto-assignment configuration. You can find the current workflow configuration of your trackers within the project admin tab in subsection “Tracker Settings.”

Please take part in our Survey

If you would like to take part in our survey, you can rate five proposed new features that extend the functionality of SFEE's Tracker Workflow Engine. Every feature comes with three examples of how it can be applied to boost the tracker workflow and ticket handling process within your organization.

Of course, you know better what your organization needs than we do, so don't miss the chance to vote for and comment on these new features.

Please share your Tracker Workflow Configuration with us (Free Open Source Tool)

Getting a rating for potential features is one part to improve SFEE - seeing how the current features are actually used is another one. Therefore, we developed an Open Source SFEE workflow extractor tool.

CollabNet's Workflow Extractor Tool will automatically extract the tracker workflow configuration of your system and store it within an XML file. If you send the information within this XML file to CollabNet (please zip it before), it will be used to find out how and how often the various features currently available within the tracker workflow engine are actually used and how they can be improved.

If you like that CollabNet can come up with further ideas of improvements by considering your unique situation, just download  our tracker workflow configuration extractor tool, follow the instructions in the README file and send the resulting (zipped) XML file to CollabNet.

Play around with Free Code Samples

Last but not least, the full source code of the workflow extractor tool and a pre-configured Eclipse project are also part of the download. If you are interested in some free code samples how to retrieve the tracker workflow configuration, the project names, its associated users, releases and tracker names for your whole SFEE site or even multiple sites, feel free to play around with the code. Of course, you are allowed to use some snippets within your own projects.

Thank you for actively shaping the future of SourceForge Enterprise Edition, I promise to keep you updated!