[Twisted-Python] Regarding customer support...

[Jason Asbahr]

Given some of the chats I've had with Glyph regarding bug tracking, 
customer support, and project management in Twisted, here's a nice 
overview article that provides some concrete definitions and feature 
descriptions for each.  Note the "Workflow Management" paragraph where 
the author claims that the above mentioned systems are instances of 
Workflow Management and a system built around workflow management 
abstractions could be 'trivially' used to develop the others.

	http://linas.org/linux/pm.html

Looking at the numerous examples of partial implementations of these 
various systems out there, it seems that it is easy to start one of 
these projects, but hard to get it to the point where it is actually 
useful (and I'm specifically looking at project management here).

Apparently there was a project manager called Xen for Zope, but it seems 
dead now.

But here are two interesting bits of code that could be incorporated 
into a Twisted-based project manager -- PyGantt, which take an 
XML-formatted project description and generates an HTML Gantt chart; and 
an O'Reilly article that describes something similar with Piddle.

http://www.logilab.org/pygantt/

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2001/05/31/piddle.html

PyGantt is neat because it could be modified to generate hyperlinked 
project task titles that would go to a task description dialog (or 
page).  Dates could also be hyperlinked for editing.  The XML part could 
be factored out into import/export, and the project description could be 
instead accessed from project-tree and task-node instances in Twisted.

Having a way to represent "user stories" and "use cases" as task nodes 
would be cool.  Then Roark could (ahem, when I get time to help Matt 
work on it) be used to create and edit use cases and other modeling 
entities and the task manager could be used to schedule and track 
progress on them.

Cheers,

Jason