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Bit of an odd query, which I'm having a bit of trouble googling a solution for...
Currently we have an in-house tool for our manual deployment process that runs on a mainframe and provides a web-interface so anybody can update it. It have a list of pre-requisites, and tasks will "go green" as soon as the prerequisites are met so that a user can then click "start" and record times etc automatically.
We've just been told that they are getting rid of the webserver on the mainframe, so we're either going to have to re-write it somewhere else, or use an "off the shelf" tool.
Is this the sort of thing you can do in teams (can you copy a repeatable set of tasks in a group & assign pre-requisites?) or is there something else that could work? We won't get approval for using monday.com or other cloud solutions but if there's somethign cheap / one-off we could by it might be better than rolling our own (again).
Key features -
Be web-accessible, with a log in
Tracks task pre-requisites, only allowing tasks where the prerequisites have been met to be started.
Tracks task start / end (assigning logged in user to the task, recording completion start / end times)
Tasks can either have notes within, or link to a wiki with detailed instructions.
Groups of tasks are repeatable / easy to copy
You can set Jira up to do that (once you are up the learning curve!) but I believe self-hosting Jira is being discontinued, and it will all be cloud in a few years.
Planner ( https://tasks.office.com/ ) is the Office 365 thing that you probably have if you use Teams.
No strict pre-req features but a task can have a checklist of sub-tasks. Changes / notes etc are tracked. People who've had any involvement with a task (assignees, or added a note) get emailed when anything changes on it.
We use a bucket of template tasks, you can easily copy a task to a new one, with any of the elements of the templates in it.
Tracks task pre-requisites, only allowing tasks where the prerequisites have been met to be started.
Do you mean the tool checks to see if some condition has been met ie a task has completed successfully?
Or could they be manually checked to green? If the latter, then Trello will do that for you.
Edit - you might actually be able to automate some of it using the email to trello card function or other power up integrations.
Do you mean the tool checks to see if some condition has been met ie a task has completed successfully?
It doesn't actually check successful completion, but it does check that the person assigned to the previous task has ticked the "complete" button.
@poly - we have jira, so that's something we could leverage. I will investigate.
@simon_g - we don't have teams across the whole enterprise yet, but it's supposed to be coming. I'll have a fettle on the website and see what I can do.
Do you have Azure DevOps?
That has a "Boards" section for all things planning.
@poly – we have jira, so that’s something we could leverage. I will investigate.
I'm afraid I'm only a user but we have workflows for various things so it can't progress to certain stages without various approvals or prior tasks being completed etc. I've no idea how easy that was to set up - our Jira guru regards most things as trivial, whereas I usually find it only marginally more user friendly than STW!
I believe our software teams use a mixture Git, Jira and team city to do a lot of this. Fortunately I'm not aware of any of the actual details so probably can't offer any useful advice beyond that small set of tool names.
Sounds like something Jira would do maybe with some added Jenkins if you need any automated build, test deployment type thingy..
We have all the automated build stuff (I believe it's Jira /GIT/Jenkins) but the app I look after doesn't have any of that.
This is to track manual steps needed on a midrange platform that can't be done by the auto-deploy tools and a human needs to do it (archaic, I know).
