Gathering requirements: RT dashboard
Gergely Sipos introduces the new Request Tracker dashboard
As of January 2011, grid infrastructure users and operations teams can submit their service requirements as tickets to the new Request Tracker (RT) dashboard. The tickets will be handled by the EGI.eu user support and operations teams and categorised by community (for example NGIs, projects, virtual organisations) or according to their status (new, open, accepted, resolved).
The RT system will help the user support team to keep track of what needs to be done and lets the whole EGI community know. It’s a global view of what European scientific communities need from EGI.
Requirements will be posted in an open ticketing system, which makes the gathering and solution provisioning processes open and transparent. This allows the community to check if what they need has already been required by other users, teams or NGI staff and will save time for user communities, for technology providers and avoid duplication of efforts.
The dashboard allows individual users and communities to keep track of what is happening to their ticket and see where their requirement is in the workflow. Users can also comment on existing tickets: you can offer your own solution to the requirements posted on the dashboard as a Technology Provider, an NGI member or member of other EGI communities. The openness of the new RT system will generate discussions between scientific grid user communities and software developers and catalyse solutions.
The evolution of the European Grid Infrastructure is driven by the users. Therefore capturing and communicating feedback from users to the infrastructure, as well as technology operators and providers, is a key goal for user support and for the EGI collaboration as a whole.
The RT dashboard was born out of this commitment. Previous systems to compile requirements were based for instance on spread sheets. It was time-consuming to manage and it did not promote dialogue between users, support and operations teams.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, the user support team adapted the request ticketing system already in place to prioritise the workload of the EGI-InSPIRE project to collect the community’s needs.
