Unfeature 6: Depends-on & Blocksby Ryan

One thing we've been against from the beginning is adding stuff like dependency and blocker tracking to Bugrocket. This is sometimes a hard sell for people who have larger or more complex projects and want to break up big plans into multiple small tickets and somehow maintain links between the 'children' and their 'parent'.

To us, the complexity this would add to the system is just not worth the benefits. We settled on suggesting the use of our markdown extensions (which you can read about in the help popup near the comment box) to make adhoc links between tickets that are related.

For example, you have ticket 36 as a big-picture/bucket and ticket 37 and 38 as conceptually dependent children. You would just comment on all of the tickets and refer to the others:

This is part of [ticket:36].

Simple enough. But it can get fairly tiresome to, after making all of the children, go and comment on the parent and say:

[ticket:37], [ticket:38] block this.

So we sat on that for a while and finally decided to just cut out the last step and do it automatically for you.

When you comment on a ticket and refer to another ticket, the reference will be logged without you having to do anything. So as in our previous example, ticket 37 has a reference to ticket 36 (by writing [ticket:36]). So an item like the following will be automatically inserted in the ticket 36 history:

Hover on the ticket number see some details, and of course click to visit:

And when that referenced ticket is closed, it will get the same strike-through that all ticket links get when their targets are closed:

So, rather than a 'dependencies' or 'blockers' input on ticket edit pages, you simply say what the case is and link to the ticket. The ticket you link to will get an entry in it's history that documents the mention (and appropriate emails will be sent, etc). We think it's a good compromise that covers the use-case but doesn't add pain to our daily lives :)