Anatomy of an ASCOM Issue
TiGra Astronomy hosts the development platform for The ASCOM Initiative. One of the essential tools we provide is the ASCOM Issue Tracker, which uses a product called Jira from Atlassian.
Jira provides issue tracking, project management and a central ‘dashboard’ where users and developers can get an overview of what’s happening. It is a very flexible and powerful tool and has dozens of plug-in modules to extend and enhance its operation. Small development shops with under 10 users can get started for just $10 but for open source software, Atlassian will usually give away a free license, so The ASCOM Initiative is able to use top-notch development systems at very low cost.
Each issue created in Jira has a definite life-cycle, or workflow. Users may be interested to know the workflow for an ASCOM issue. The latest version of Jira (4.4 at the time of writing) has a nice workflow designer, which enables me to edit workflows graphically, so here it is:
