Pulsar Consulting | inFlowTracerPro

inFlowTracerPro

The state of the art tool for documenting, tracking and efficiently managing all kinds of information within a company (topics), such as tasks, performances, questions, enhancement suggestions, change requests, services, helpdesk or support tickets and problem reports (during all phases of the development of software applications).
The inFlowTracerPro application allows to know on what and how persons work in a company. It can be completed with another Pulsar tool, iActivityTracer, allowing to know why, when and where persons are present or not (tracking and allowance of holidays, illness, training, consultancy, etc.).

More Information

Please find the full application here (restricted access).

Application Scope

The inFlowTracer project includes:

Topic description including specification of type, status, severity/priority, affected project, affected version, requestor (issuer), solver/executor/performer, time and dates
Powerful topic searching and browsing
History of all topics
Status flows defined by the methodology or by customized rules
Allow managing several applications in the same repository
Provide specific project reports
Management of attached files
Web interface allowing multiple connected users
Application logging required
User profiles and preferences
No runtime product licenses needed (no Oracle)

Technology

This application was built using Pulsar's framework called GID/GIDPro. GIDPro is initially an assembly of several top market open source libraries forming together a consistent development and runtime platform.
This framework allows rapid application development (RAD) of Web applications being coupled with relational databases. in an extensible, modular and reliable architecture. It includes a wizard and a repository for registering easily all page items, actions and navigation links.
Other standard technologies used in the development of this application are:

Velocity, CSS and Javascript for writing the HTML pages
Struts actions as a link between business logics and database access
postgreSQL database + PG Admin
Hibernate as ORM layer for the inFlowTracerPro database
Eclipse as Java development environment
PowerDesigner to design and generate the original Oracle database
Tomcat as web application server
Apache as web listener and HTTPS server
LDAP as user authentication repository

Main Concepts

TOPICS
Topics are information having a life-cycle along a list of users. They are linked to specific applications/projects which hierarchy appears in a tree. Each topic follows a specific template that defines its look and status flow.

TEMPLATES
Each topic follows a specific template that defines its look and status flow:

PERF is the template used to register performed personal tasks
TASK is the template used to track personal tasks
TEST is the template used to report problems
MAINT-TRACE is the template use to track maintenance tasks
ESTIMATE is the template used to track enhancements and

STATUS FLOW
A status flow restricts the list of status a topic can take. It also defines which role can move a topic from which status to which other one. Here aside, an example of a status flow for bug reports.

USER ROLES (PROFILES)
Users are assigned a role within an application/project and for a specific template, which defines which actions are allowed to them.

The requestor issues the topic
The solver is in charge of solving a bug, the executor is the one executing a task, the performer is the one executing a performance
The QA Officer registers a project, creates its structure and assign roles to other people, checks that the reported bugs are solved.

The general diagram given below shows the life-cycle of information stored into each template all along the phases of project management, as well as the correspondences between templates.

Menu
An application or project may be selected in the combo box of the menu frame, on the left part of the screen.
The current template must always be selected in the 2nd combo box of the menu frame.
An application part or subproject may be selected by clicking in the tree displayed in the menu frame, on the left part of the screen.
The button Unselect allows to undo the selection made in the tree.
A preferred tree can be displayed with only the branches predefined by the user.

Search
It is possible to search topics either using predefined search criteria or using a query.

The first option is intended to allow searching topics using the most important search criteria. It does not intend to cover all possible searches.
The second option is more complex but more flexible and generic: it allows users to create queries on all possible fields describing topics, and allows building all possible combinations of criteria's.

Using queries is recommended specifically for:

all usual (frequent) searches, like “all opened topics”, “all topics I am in charge of as solver”
or more complex searches that are not feasible using the search topic screen:
- searching for a OR combination of several values of a given field (e.g. severity = major or blocking)
- searching on a single text field (e.g. only on the title, not all the other textual description fields)
The list of columns in the result list depends on the selected template. Clicking on the small arrow icon on top of the column titles allows to sort the result list according to the selected column.

Complete information are given in the detailed list of result.
The first column is reserved to mark with a trombone all the topics having attached files.
At the end of the result list a “total” line is displayed, giving the count of topics and the totals of the estimated and actual hours. The count of topics is also given at the top of the result list.
It is possible to report results or detailed results in pdf format and to export detailed results in csv.
All items in the result list are selectable by simple click for modify/delete.

Remark: all print actions generate a report in pdf format.

The following actions are available on topics:

add a topic
modify topics
copy an existing topic to a new one
move a topic to another project or application part
delete topics
upload and download attachments
view history
transfer to another template
fill in automatically a new topic from a selected model (called preferred topic)
and many other to discover...

Administration Screens

Any person with a role of QA Officer for a combination of application and template has user admin rights for that particular combination. The user admin has the right to modify an existing project structure or to add a new application/project. He can also import/export a structure via XML.

The user admin must take care of the information versioning by associating version and phase labels to a project at appropriate time.

History of changes made to an application can be recorded for each version.

The user admin can see who is assigned which role for a specific combination of application and template. He can grant new roles or revoke existing ones.