2 questions about LP

Hi! I’m considering switching to LP for my project, but have a couple questions:

1. Is LP suited to software development where you might need to add/assign hundreds of bugs to be fixed. What is the recommended way to handle such micro-tasks in LP?

2. Does LP offer anything to help with the fact that not all contractors of a distributed company are equally trusted. For example, when I upload a task document for a developer to work on, I don’t necessarily want a 10 hr/week logo-artist who I’ve never met to have access to that same confidential document. Is everying in LP accessible to all other members, or can restrictions be put in place?

Thank you.

@ Atlas – sorry for the delay. Your first question was so good, that I decided to write a blog post on it: http://www.liquidplanner.com/blog/?p=45

In short, LiquidPlanner offers a great, lightweight solution for bug tracking. Our team has ~2000 items in our work space right now; some are big things, many are small issues and bugs. It’s all work and it all needs to be managed.

Regarding your second question, we are gathering requirements now for features that would offer more control over access. For the moment we only offer the in/out model. If your part time resource does not need to access the plan, you could create a virtual resource to track the work yourself.

Thank you for the reply! I will read the blog post shortly.

I just wanted to give a little feedback on this forum. I checked “monitoring topic” which implied to me I would receive an email when someone replied. But no email came. It’s possible that “monitoring topic” means something else of course.

Regarding limiting access rights: The best solution is probably the simplest. If the manager limits the rights of a project/folder to certain users, automatically all sub-projects/folders receive the same treatment. That makes it easy to make one restricted folder where sensitive data can go.

If a user does not have rights to access a folder, then that folder should be completely invisible to him. This is done to avoid the subtle, but still negative psychological consequences of knowing there is something that’s there but you can’t access.

I’ve entered a bug in our “LP Dogfood” work space for Adam to look at the monitoring topic. I’ve also added your suggestion to our LP Dogfood collector project for enhancements to the access model. Thanks for your help Atlas!

Awesome! Another thing I like about the permssions thing: It allows me to make work-in-progress project/task trees invisible by setting rights only to me. Then when I’m done setting everything up I can make them visible all at once by setting rights of the root folder to everyone.

That sounds like a slightly different feature – it sounds like you want to model and then commit work. Would you expect to see the effects of work that is estimated and scheduled but that is hidden from view; specifically – people would have gaps in thier schedules that need to be explained by work that is hidden—get my point?

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I guess a feature that allows you to mark a folder as “work-in-progress” or “inactive” or something so that it didn’t affect any timetable would be good. I would then use the two features in concert—when I set up the planning for a new product, I’d mark it as inactive as well as give rights only to me. That would fulfill all my requirements: the project would be invisible and it also wouldn’t affect any timetables.

I suppose for clarity for new users, if you deny someone rights to a project, yet they are assigned items within that project, a big fat warning should appear, telling you to either give that person rights or to make the project inactive.

Just wanted to follow-up and say that I still don’t get emails about replies when I monitor a topic.