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We offer Orange Tracker training sessions, visit: Orange Tracker Training (staff/faculty login required)

For information on how create a new Orange Tracker project, visit:  Request a New Orange Tracker Project (staff/faculty login required)


Overview

Orange Tracker (OT) is based from Atlassian's Jira, an issue management platform that allows teams, or departments to manage their tasks. Syracuse University's ITS department funds OT and fully maintains the system for the organization. ITS also builds standards and baselines for departments to use. The system is designed to manage tasks within a department or team. Each department has their own tasks, users who can work on tasks, and project managers who run the project.

The ITS department continues to make improvements to the OT system.

Terminology

What is a Project?

A project is a collection of issues, and is defined according to your department's requirements. For example, a project could be:

  • a marketing campaign
  • a helpdesk system
  • a website enhancement request system

For example, the ITS Service Center has project that maintains all the help requests from SU and non-SU affiliated individuals. Help requests enter the project by email, by web form, and manually by team members.

What is an Issue?

An issue could represent a project task, a helpdesk ticket, a leave request form, etc. Every issue belongs to a project. Each project has a name (e.g. Website Issues) and a key (e.g. WEB). The project key becomes the first part of that project's issue keys, e.g. WEB-101, WEB-102, etc.

Each issue captures a number of data fields: Who created the issue, who the Consultant is, when the issue was created or last updated, and a number of other standard fields. Issues can hold custom fields also, if the project requires to hold special data.

There are many ways to create an issue: Through email, a form, or creating one within OT.

Issues can be linked to other issues in a parent/children relation or similar relations. Linked issues can span across different projects if needed.

Issues can also be within other issues, called sub-tasks.

Issues can be moved to different projects as well.

What are Roles?

Roles are certain permission levels within a project. For more information, please see the Manage Project Role Membership page.

What is a Component?

A project component is a logical grouping of issues within a project. Each project may consist of various components (or none), depending on your department's needs. This is a great way to search within the project and find all issue with a certain component. Components are project specific and maintained by the project managers of that project. Please see the Manage Project Components page for more information.

What is Workflow?

Workflow is the set of statuses and transitions that an issue goes through during its lifecycle. The following diagram shows Jira's built-in workflow:

Image displaying standard workflow



Please see the Workflow Schemes page for more on workflows.

Visualization of Orange Tracker

Visualization of Orange Tracker can be found on the Orange Tracker Visualization page

Information for Users

For more information on how to use and work with Orange Tracker, please go to our Orange Tracker help pages: https://answers.syr.edu/x/3Yk7