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We've been dutifully using Trac for several years now, and our "active tickets" list has grown to almost 200 items. These include bugs that are too low priority and too complicated to fix for now, feature requests that have been deferred, issues that have never really generated complaints but everyone agrees ought to be fixed someday, planned code refactorings and other design infelicities that we don't want to lose track of, etc.

As a result, with almost 200 of these issues, the list is almost overwhelming; it's no longer useful as a source of what needs to be worked on right now.

What's the best way to keep track of issues of this sort?

Part of the problem is that some of these issues are such a low priority that they may never get done. I hate to lose track of these items (similar to not wanting to throw something out of my house in case I might need it someday); do I need to throw them out regardless (by marking them as wontfix) and assume I can find them in the future if I ever do need them?

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200 for a whole team made me laugh. :-) I alone have 120 open issues, most of which I'll never come around to fix! -- So to sum up: great question! I was just about to ask the same. –  Martin Ba Nov 9 '11 at 16:29
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4 Answers

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Does Trac have a priority setting? Something like 1 for major show-stoppers and 5 or so for things that would be nice to have done sometime?

If you can sort on priority, you can disregard the lower priority stuff for now.

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Anything that is on the level of "nice to have done sometime" will never get done. Yank it out. –  Aaron McIver Feb 8 '11 at 21:38
@Aaron: I'd rather keep it around in case we want to raise the priority sometime. Clearly, it will never get done at that priority, not unless the developers have far too much time on their hands (and have already made a gopher client for the software and made it haiku-compliant). –  David Thornley Feb 8 '11 at 21:49
Trac does have a priority setting, although we've accumulated enough of a backlog that I've just about decided we still need a "yank it out" approach. –  Josh Kelley Feb 11 '11 at 2:12
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read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5S_%28methodology%29

Put them in the attic, wait a year, then move house. That is what I do.

Seriously if you are not going to fix it them forget about it. See Extreme Programming.

But For items about code. You could put them in a code review system, as minor observations. This system can be set up to flag up issues when that part of the system is edited. I found this did not work as co-workers, thought this is what was expected and did not address review observations.

The only way to do it is ruthless prioritisation. Do it now or don't bother.

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This really depends on a few things.

  1. How large is the team: If the team is large enough you can assign tickets in a fashion that would allow the lower priority items to get completed.
  2. How often do you do releases: If the release cycle is long enough you can get away with adding more things or holding off on a release until you have all the tickets resolved.
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