Tracker

Intro

Tracker is a web tool designed to help in communication between 1st and 2nd line support It's written in Java and based on Struts 2 / JSP. No install required on any PC.

It allows to avoid information circulating via mail capturing not just issues information but workaround and analysis improvement suggestions too.

How it works

Issue submission

Applications to be managed via Tracker need to be defined using an XML schema. Few attributes of the issue could be captured via the application definition schema:

• Severity and priority through a set of meaningful impacts
• Other issue details (e.g. Location, Who raised the issue, business flow impacted etc)
• Default parameters each application will have (e.g. Subject, Description, ETA, Attachments etc)

Worflow management

All the 1st and 2nd support line team members can subscribe issues by application, severity, ETA. Once an issue is submitted, the matching subscriber will receive an email immediately. Links in the email allow the subscriber to participate to issue resolution process by adding comments, specific analysis requests, workaround suggestions All of these, when entered in the 'Comments' form, generate a mail to the issue subscriber. The workflow continue till when the investigation is completed. At that point it is possible to close the issue in Tracker and generate further action like creating a corresponding issue in Jira (populating it with the meaningful information already part of the Tracker issue) It should be fairly easy to extend it to populate other tools following the same approach adopted for Jira.

Support advantages

After issues have been entered, a Lucene search provide a list of similar issues already in the database. If correctly managed in the past, this is a great help for the support team who can immediately find suggestions given in the past in similar circumstances anticipating and reducing the time to solution