Selective visibility of bugs in project, to users/groups?.

[iosman123]

Hello,

I am readying my engineering team to move over to Mantis from a home grown internal system that is nolonger manageable/supportable. I have been a supporter of Matis solution over several years though use in other business projects.

In getting ready for this move to Mantis I created a feature comparison matrix. This highlighted one missing major feature which we rely on heavily at my company. This posting is an attempt to discover how to access a possible well hidden feature in Mantis or to ask if this is on the current feature roadmap or to get advise on how such a feature could be implemented within the current framework for the benefit of the product.

Our current system is both used internally and customer facing. Our customers have the ability in our current system to report new bugs and track those same bugs as well as see the state of issues/bugs which we have made visible to them.

The way in which this works is that each user belongs to a group. The default group is the bug system owner (us). By default any bug created is made visible to the default group and the reporter's group (which may be the same). In addition any member of the default group at a specific role/level or higher, has the ability to make any bug when created or at any later time visible to any number of other groups.

What this implies is that for any given project/product all bugs are viewable by the default group. For any given project/product though there may be bugs that were created by a member of the non default group and is therfore additionally viewable/trackable by members of that group. Lastly, there may also be bugs that have been made visible to one or more other groups my a default group member.

thanks
iosman

[cas]

Depends on the setup you choose. You could setup underneath each project 2 or more sub-projects, one for the default group and one for each other group. This however would bring additional maintenance which you prabably do not like.
Alternative would be to use a plugin for that

[ymilan]

Hello,
I'm trying to implement that very feature described by OP in my project but I don't know what plugin to use. The thing is I would like one bug to be seen by numerous chosen users, no matter who reported it, and be hidden from the others. Do you think that is possible ?
Thanks a lot

[cas]

Simply make a private project per group. Give respective users only access to their own project and the support team to all projects.
Life can be simple

[ymilan]

I thought of that solution but some bugs can impact numerous users.

Let's say we have team A, team B and team C.

A team A member could notice a bug that impacts its work and report it. However that bug must be solved by team B. Thus this bug should be seen by team A and B at the same time.

Other bugs reported by team A should also be solved by team A but also impact team C, thus, team B shouldn't be able to see it while team A and C should be able to see and update it.

Some other bugs can impact all three teams, so all three teams must be allowed to update it, however team C is responsible for the solving.

Is this possible with projects or is a plugin existing ? Can a bug be in multiple projects and be updated cross projects ?
Thanks a lot

[cas]

As far as I am aware that is not an option. Also am not ware of an existing plugin.
A plugin is the logical way forward but having said that, you may end up having a lot of issues to get this working because of the embedded authorization scheme.
Are your issues that secret that teams cannot see eachoter issues?

[ymilan]

Arf, that's so bad. The thing is that in my Team A, B, C example, team A and B could be competitors working on different parts of the same project. Thus, it would be dangerous that a competitor can compare how many bugs you report compared to them. I'm surprised that no solution for this exist though, I wouldn't have thought that this case never occured in the history of Mantis tool.
Thanks again for your help !

[cas]

I do not know how many teams you have but in case of 3 teams, you could setup a a mnain project for the total project itself and define a few subprojects to deal with hthis issue.
So structure would be:
Main Project M project itself, access for you, you see all
Sub project A => Team A
Sub project B => Team B
Sub project C => Team C
Sub project AB => Teams A&B
Sub project AC => Teams A&C
Sub project BC => Teams B&C
Sub project ABC => Teams A,B&C
Like this you still have the global overview and issues can be allocated to the correct sub-project by whoever is in charge of that.
So you can deal with it relative easy in my view.

[atrol]

The option described below might help.
Configure it in config_inc.php.
If you prefer UI, or want set it different in different projects, check page Manage > Configuration > Workflow Thresholds
"View other users' issues (if not set, access will be limited to issues reported, handled, or monitored by the user)"

Code: Select all

/**
 * Threshold at which a user can view all issues in the project (as allowed by other permissions).
 *
 * Not meeting this threshold means the user can only see the issues they reported,
 * are handling or monitoring.
 *
 * A value of ANYBODY means that all users have full visibility (as default)
 *
 * This is a replacement for old option {@see $g_limit_reporters}.
 *
 * @global int $g_limit_view_unless_threshold
 */
$g_limit_view_unless_threshold = ANYBODY;