I tried a little experiment to make a popup using a details element. The goal was to see if I could make a clickable popup without using JavaScript. It should be accessible for both sighted users and users using a screen reader like NVDA.

The HTML test case is a form with an info icon (the letter I in a circular blue field) after an input element. It is straightforward semantic HTML. The details element has a summary as its first element and a div enclosing paragraphs as the details' body. The summary element is the letter I styled using CSS to put the I (for info) on a circular lightblue field. The form looks like:

One of the things I have to do when developing a new tracker for the Roundup Issue Tracker is test on mobile browsers. When I run into issues, I used to hook up a remote debugger. This usually requires finding a USB cable as wifi is less reliable.

I really wish that mobile browsers had a native console that I could use to see console.log output and javascript errors. While not native, MobileConsole by hnldesign provides quite a bit of power by including one script and one style tag in my HTML page. At 45k uncompressed (17k gzipped) it's sized between the smallest and largest mobile consoles I found.

I am a developer for the open source Roundup Issue Tracker. It has many use cases. One is to develop issue trackers like GitHub Issues, Bugzilla, or Request Tracker. I also develop a custom issue tracker for a help desk environment. This article describes the steps in adding a task-timing feature for that tracker.

A user requested a task timer. The workflow:

• open an issue page,
• start a timer,
• start the task associated with the issue,
• use the issue page to document the work.

When done, the user would:

• stop the timer,
• finish documentation, attach files, and make other changes to the issue,
• submit the time and other changes.

There are a few decisions to make:

• timer functions
  • is start/stop enough?
  • is pause/restart needed?
  • does the user need to change/set/edit the timer?
  • do we need to track seconds, minutes, and hours? Since the customer is billed for the time, recording seconds seems excessive. Is there a scenario where the timer would need to record seconds?
• timer controls
  • do we use a button/buttons? Does checking a checkbox activate the timer?
  • what does the UI look like for each timer function? Are the controls in the issue page? Are the controls in a floating popup? Does the popup need to be movable/collapsible so it doesn't block access to the underlying issue?
• notification feedback
  • how is the user notified that the timer is running/paused/stopped?
  • how does the user see the elapsed time?
• future planning
  • how to add controls without cluttering an already complex interface
  • what impact will this have on adding future feature requests in the same context
  • does this guide us in implementing future workflows

I am a developer on the Roundup Issue Tracker. Roundup is a trouble ticketing system written in Python. It is very flexible. Developers, researchers, and support staff use Roundup to define and manage the lifecycle of issues.

My background is in system administration. So I have built a tracker template designed for tracking system administration issues. Recently I redesigned the look of one of the more complex forms.

This is the (short) story of the decisions I made and the techniques I used.

Welcome to the first article on the ongoing development of the Roundup Issue Tracker. Before we get started, a little about me.

I have a B.S. in Physics which included some advanced computer science courses. But, my career ended up in system administration. I have taught and published a few peer-reviewed papers at conferences over the years. Trying to reduce toil and improve operations, lead to my interest in ticketing systems. Tools from LEAN and Six Sigma have proven valuable in analyzing ticketing and real-time logging data.

Issues Need Tracking

In 2002, I ran a lab that installed a system monitoring solution on Sun computers. We needed to track requests that came to the lab. I evaluated ticketing systems across a few dimensions. The Roundup Issue Tracker scored the highest.

Five minutes after downloading the software, I had a classic tracker running in demo mode. After entering a few tickets and adding a few keywords (tags), my co-worker and I decided it could work. It was flexible and looked like we could extend it to support our future growth. Little did I know that this was the start of a 20+ year relationship.