I just installed trac for this project I’m working on, since it’s turned out to be a bit bigger than I anticipated. I’ve added a bunch of tickets with my clients requests which come in the form of emails, phone calls, and meetings. I’ve also added some stuff I know needs to be done/fixed but they haven’t specifically requested. Should I grant them access to trac so they can submit the tickets themselves so I don’t have to keep translating (words into tickets) for them? They’re very non-technical, so I’m not sure how well it would work; they might open tickets and not provide enough detail, or get confused by all the different fields.
If your answer is “no”, should I at least let them view the tickets, so they can see what I’m working on, what’s been done, hasn’t been done?
At my company, we’re struggling to get good problem descriptions in tickets from a technical audience (system administrators, technical consultants etc), and more often than not it takes inquiries from our professional helpdesk before an issue is layed out clear enough for a developer to work on.
Thus, from many years of experience, I would clearly advise against letting all your customers open tickets (unless you can narrow them down to a technical audience) because it will not save you any work compared to e-mails.
Read access is a good idea (because people will still feel much more involved) – you just have to make sure that you do not have too many tickets (usually low prio bugs or requests) that remain in the same state for a long time because this will start to frustrate the person who submitted it (better to close such a ticket in a timely manner if you can’t or do not want to work on it, this kind of honesty if usually more appreciated than letting a ticket open for years ,-).