Can we see others' help desk cases?

[darius (Darius Jazayeri)]

Continuing the discussion from Release Reference Application modules for 2.4 release:

It is highly inefficient for @burke to have to be doing multiple talk posts checking that a helpdesk ticket has been created, and then has to ask about its status.

Is there something we can do, process-wise or tool-wise, to get better visibility into what is happening to blocker/community-priority helpdesk issues?

Could @burke and others on the PM team be given visibility into helpdesk tickets? Could there be a way to mark certain helpdesk tickets and high-priority and public?

I’m not complaining about response time–I know it’s a volunteer team, as @r0bby says on the other thread–but rather the fact that there’s no way to see whether or not progress is being made, or what the status of things are.

[michael (Michael Downey)]

The help desk is designed to respond to requests from a single individual, related to problems or configuration changes they need to accomplish a specific goal.

Policy-level discussions should not be happening in the help desk, because those discussions are necessarily and inherently private by default for security reasons. Any individual can sign in to the help.openmrs.org portal and use the “My Cases” button to review all their cases and communication on them.

The problem with the referenced topic is that the requests have been coming from a huge number of sources, and not everyone is clear about the current status as of today. As I have mentioned here before, there is no UAT02 server in our inventory:

Reference Application 2.4 Release to UAT

There is no server uat02 currently in our inventory: There is a uat01, which, according to our records, is currently allocated to @maurya for “OpenMRS Reference Application 2.2 Testing”. Interestingly, the alias uat-platform was assigned to this host. It would seem that you would prefer to remove the uat-platform.openmrs.org alias and instead have uat-refapp. Is that correct?

Unfortunately, nor do we currently have any funds for additional servers:

Temporarily out of capacity for new test servers

As mentioned in a few previous developers forum meetings over the past couple months, I wanted to post a reminder that we currently are out of server capacity from our donated space on the XSEDE system managed by Indiana University. Additionally, as also mentioned in a different topic, there is currently no funding for additional infrastructure resources, although we have submitted a budget for potential funding this year. What this means to you: As a result, there is currently a waiting list f…

I have ensured that all our (many!) conflicting cases referencing “UAT02” have been responded with the current information, and have closed them all. Going forward, the help desk will only act upon test server cases from @burke, in lieu of anyone being named responsible for QA, until that person is designated. (And then only from that person.

Fundamentally, the problem with the communication here is that we (still) don’t have single points of contact within the engineering “organization” responsible/accountable for most types of decisions. I do not understand why we have been waiting on this to happen for so many years now. But as mentioned to some of you previously, as a result of the organization chart for engineering that has remained essentially empty for the past 15 months we have had many people making conflicting requests to the help desk related to test servers, and it’s been impossible for us to reconcile them.

Summary:

• The help desk is designed for support of individuals’ requests.
• An individual can review all of their cases (but not others’) on the web portal.
• When “everyone is responsible” for certain types of decisions, no one is really responsible because there’s no coordination.
• There is no UAT02 server, nor do we have resources to add an additional one at this time. We could re-allocate an existing test server if one is no longer in use.