I have an existing project in FB that is used by a small team of developers for a software product. The project contains about 10 areas that correspond to functional areas within the software. The areas are used for filtering/sorting purposes and to allow different primary contacts for different areas.
We now have a need to allow a small group of external customers to submit cases and receive feedback on those cases. A technical support group will have primary responsibility for handling these customer cases and following up with customers. If bugs are found or if other developer support is needed, then we need to be able to assign these cases to the development team. We also want the ability to easily filter customer cases, development cases, or both.
We looking at the public submission feature to help accomplish this. We don't want to open up public submission in the existing development project for a few reasons. First, we don't want to allow public submissions to be assigned directly to development, they should always go to support. Second, we want the public submission interface to present a different set of areas: problem, feature request, question.
To allow different contacts and areas for public vs development cases, it seems that we must use separate projects. If the product is named XYZ, then the projects could be "XYZ Development" and "XYZ Support". This leaves a few problems.
Using separate projects, searching/filtering becomes more difficult when we want to include both development and support cases. I know it's possible to search multiple projects via the search interface, and that can be saved as a filter, but that's not as simple as just setting up a filter. It would be helpful if FB would add the ability to define filters that include multiple projects. Another thing that would help is the ability to define subprojects. We could have a root project for the product, and subprojects for development and support. Searches on the root project would include all subprojects. I know we could also use tags and search for tags, but since tags are entered manually as free text I'm reluctant to rely on them being entered consistently and correctly.
The more important problem is how to assign cases from support to development. If we change the project of a support case, it would be removed from the radar of the tech support team. We also couldn't maintain unique project areas if we move cases back and forth between the projects. One seemingly simple solution would be if FB would allow cases to exist in multiple projects. Barring that, the best solution I can think of is to use subcases. For example, say that a customer submits a case in the support project. Tech support confirms that it is a bug that needs to be assigned to development. They create a subcase and assign the subcase to development. They monitor the progress of the subcase, and when it is resolved they followup with the customer and resolve the support case. This would accomplish what we need, and has the benefit that the customer and development cases can have different assignments and resolutions. My concern is that creating the subcase is a little tedious and possibly error prone.
Does anyone have suggestions for different or better ways to do this?
Thanks in advance for any input.
