Rational Team Concert has a little-known feature, which you can see in action on jazz.net, to make bug reporting more simple for your stakeholders. With this feature, project owners can specify which work item categories are visible to all users, and which categories are visible to project members only.

This means you can configure your project so that when a business user or other outside stakeholder wants to submit a work item, they won’t be confused by a huge list of categories in the “Filed Against” field.

This ultimately means less confusion for your stakeholders.

Here’s how the RTC team has currently configured their work item categories for their project area here on jazz.net:

So, when you, our community members, go to file a bug against Rational Team Concert, you will only see the categories that we think are most useful, and not be exposed to all the gory details of our internal development organization. Here’s what you’ll see today if you file a work item against RTC:

We’ve seen a lot of people using the “Unknown” category, which is good. If you’re not sure, you can just fire away, and the team will take care of triaging the bug to the appropriate category. It’s a nice feature that we’re definitely taking advantage of here on jazz.net with our live instances of Rational Team Concert.

Remember, you can file bugs or other enhancement requests against any of our live projects on jazz.net. Just visit the project page and find the link for submitting a bug on the right side under “Participate.”

Happy bug reporting!

—
Seth Packham
Jazz.net Website Team Lead