Introduction to Trackers

This article will introduce you to trackers, a central and very powerful feature of the Tuleap tool.

What is a Tracker in Tuleap?

A tracker is a tool for managing the tracking of work items in a project. It allows you to record, organize, track, and manage artifacts (or tickets), such as:

• Bugs

• Tasks

• Feature requests

• User stories

• And many others

Each tracker is fully customizable and can adapt to the team's processes.

Practical information

Trackers in Tuleap are a central part of project management. Thanks to their flexibility, they can adapt to almost any business process. They promote collaborative management, better traceability and workflow automation.

Structure of a Tracker

A tracker contains several key elements:

• Custom and configurable fields: text, date, user, drop-down, boolean, etc.

• Workflow : Allows you to define possible statuses (e.g., New → In Progress → Completed) and the transitions between them.

• Field rules : To define conditional behaviors.

• Permissions : fine-grained management of rights by user role (creation, updating, viewing of artifacts).

• Reports : Views filtered or sorted by some criteria.

Creating artifacts and using a tracker

Practical Information

Each artifact has a unique identifier and its own reference that can be used in the entire Tuleap platform to create a link to this element.

From the time it is created, the artifact goes through different states in the workflow (e.g., "To do", "In progress", "Under review", "Done" or "Cancelled")

The table that lists artifacts is configurable. It is possible to add columns using the button and reorder the columns of the table using .

Tracker configuration and customization

Tuleap allows project administrators to create or modify trackers according to their needs:

• Add or edit fields (required or not).

• Create workflows adapted to the chosen methodology (Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, etc.).

• Use pre-built templates or duplicate existing trackers.

• Define notification rules (email, events).

• Define permissions status.

Tracker reports

Now that trackers contain artifacts, you can extract the information to highlight it.

Tracker reports allow you to track the progress of tasks, but also extract information from the tracker to represent it graphically.

The pages of the report are composed of several elements:

• A dialog box to reuse reports that have already been saved

• A filtering section to edit the selection criteria

• Several tabs related to the report that can represent the result of the selection in different ways:

1. In a table with parameterized columns

The easiest way to view a tracker's information is to display it in a table.
The columns correspond to the fields in the tracker.  
You can choose to add or remove as many columns as you want using the column   selection box.

The first column on the left contains an "edit" icon ( ) that allows you to edit the selected artifact.    

The board can be placed on your personal dashboard or on the project dashboard (if you are a project administrator) as a widget.
The information in this table can be exported to a CSV file to be manipulated, processed and modified in a spreadsheet (Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice, ...). If you wish, you can then put them back (via the CSV import) into your tracker to update the artifacts.

2. In the form of a graph (Pie, Bar, Gantt, ...)

You can add as many charts as you want in this tab.

These charts can also be exported to your project or personal dashboards.

If you create multiple charts, you can then order them or change their display size.

3. In the form of a Cardwall

Cardwalls are tools that allow both the visualization of artifacts and their manipulation.

The maps each represent an artifact of the tracker, they can be displayed in detailed or condensed mode.

The columns of the table are created from the selection of the display field (e.g. based on the status of the tasks or on the assignment of tasks to the people concerned).

Just like other views, cardwalls can also be exported to your personal or project dashboards.

The tracker report search module

The search module is the most important component of your reports. It allows you to select which artifacts you want to appear or not.

All tabs (Charts, Cardwall, or Table), are linked to a report, so they update when you change the search criteria.

Here, the report is filtered according to the status of the artifacts: only the artifacts in progress appear ("On going"). The charts and cardwall associated with the report are also updated.

If you save the new report, it will be edited with the new search criteria, but you can also save it under a different name, such as "In progress".  And you can find it in the list of available reports.

There are two types of reports:  

• Public reports

• Personal reports

Each user can create their own personal reports and the tracker administrator can create public reports that can be reused by project members.

Practical information

It is strongly recommended to create public reports to simplify the use of trackers in your project and avoid members all creating the same reports for their personal use.