Tracking

There is a myriad of tracking (issue, action, bug, comment, etc) options at W3C and on the web as various groups within W3C's community has elected to use external services. The purpose of this writing is to outline what is available and suggestions on when to use which. Please feel free to contribute recommendations based on tools your group[s] use.

List of Trackers and Common purposes

W3C Bugzilla

Used for tracking specification changes reported by community either through mailing list or directly to Bugzilla. W3C Open Source Software projects also use to use Bugzilla for reporting bugs. Many of our active Open Source projects are now at Github

W3C Tracker

This is most commonly used to track issues and actions. There is an IRC bot that can record or recall items during teleconferences.

Last Call Comment Tracker

Used for tracking Last Call comments. Written by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, still in use but not actively maintained.

Github

Some groups that use Github for editing specifications find the issue tracking available there extremely useful as it is integrated into revision history, merge requests etc

ERCIM TRAC

Used for team-legal and some Research projects. Has a full ticket system (unused by legal) and a wiki

Mail list archives

Low tech, usually for receiving comments from the public and screened for duplicates and non-issues before adding to.

Static web pages

Some groups have preferred to maintain html or wiki pages, listing issues, owners and any custom aspects of how they choose to track items that no existing system readily allows.

Services Data

For Community Groups and Business Groups (CG/BG) W3C created a Services database to map what services (trackers, repositories, wikis, mailing lists, etc) at W3C and elsewhere is being used by a group. We intend to expose this as part of a Web API for community use and as part of dynamic group pages similar to what we provide CG/BG