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.