Best practices for issue tracking

[Brett_Hartt]

We're using Upchain for our PDM and CAD collaboration, but I'd love to use Upchain to also keep track of issues from design reviews. For example, after a series of user testing, we may come back with 5 or 6 (or 30) issues/complaints that we would like to track in Upchain. These warrant some discussion, prioritization, and eventual filtering into work orders. Here's my ideal workflow: These issues start as a problem, then get combined/consolidated/closed into actually actionable design changes via Investigation Request, and then get implemented via CR. I think the Investigation Request part kinda works, but it feels more like the second step, where the work order has been decided and just needs to be carried out.

I work at a software heavy company, and therefore see a lot of work happening in Github. Is there any kind of functionality like this (Issue, Pull Request, Merge) built into Upchain already? Or perhaps some way to emulate it otherwise? We're currently using Asana to keep track of these issues and developments, with screenshots as the means of verification, but I'd rather keep our work and stuff all in Upchain if possible.

[emily.caulfield]

Hi Brett_Hartt, thank you for your question. You are correct that the Investigation Request is the typical business process to use to track issues and other investigations. The benefit, as I'm sure you know, is that you can link each IR to a specific item so you know what the complaint/issue is for.

Note that it is possible to create several different IR workflows to govern the lifecycle of an IR, so you could create one to manage IRs for the initial complaint/issue record and a different workflow for the eventual work order that results in design changes (and can then be linked to a CR that manages the item's release). However, you would still end up with quite a long list of IRs tho without any way to organize them, other than perhaps using a naming convention? 

You could also use Project Tasks and configure specific Task workflows again to manage the initial issue gathering stage. The benefit here is that each task can be linked to an item and tasks can be nested under each other for somewhat better organization, but again there is no way to link it to an Investigation request. 

This is all I can think of just now. There isn't really anything else that mimics a pull request/merge type system. Hope that gives you some ideas.

[AACOSTAUSTK7]

Using a naming convention, we manage different IR types. The name convection is the PARTNAME-XXX. If we use this convection for MRs we can get the MRs linked to the part name on a quick search. Is there a way to search for IRs using a naming convention similar to that used for MRs?

On the advanced search, there is only an option to search for CR and CN. Am I missing something here? or there is no option to search IRs at all?

[emily.caulfield]

It appears there is no search for IRs, not even on the IR dashboard. There is a search on the CR and CN dashboards in the upper right corner, but not for IRs 😞 This might be a good request for the Upchain Ideas Board.