Issue Tracker Plugin - Organize your team's efforts, make better games faster!

[mr_smellyman]

https://create.roblox.com/store/asset/92844261822602/Issue-Tracker

It’s basically a kanban board, but in Roblox Studio. You can make issues of different types (issue, task, bug, area) and give them a title, some text, a point estimate, and leave comments on them.

Here’s an example of the board for Welcome to Farmtown. Please excuse the project tag. Issues start in the Open swimlane, but anyone on the team can easily drag and drop issues as they complete work.

Features

Assignment

Assigning an issue to someone is easy; just click “Assign to me” or “Assign to someone else”:

That will show you this:

Anyone who joins the Team Create session while you’re in it with the plugin enabled will be considered part of the team - it just watches for Player objects under the Players service.

Issue types

You can create issues of various types. The type doesn’t do anything other than changing the icon on the swimlanes view, which is useful for organization.

Issue - the default type of issue. It’s whatever you want it to be.
Task - I like to use this for to-do list items.
Bug - something’s wrong with the game and needs to be fixed.
Area - can be used like an anchor for a group of related issues. You’ll get a nice list of children issues when you open the Area, if you’ve set up parent fields on those issues.

Issue priority levels

You can also choose from 3 priority levels for any issue type:

You can define these however you wish.

Level of effort estimation

You can estimate the level of effort for an issue:

This can be interpreted however you want, but a common interpretation is days of work. You can see the total number of points in a swimlane on the swimlanes page:

History

See what happened over the full lifecycle of an issue, including comments by anyone on the team. All changes to an issue will be logged, including creation and modification of links, status changes, and estimate changes.

Issue filtering

You can also filter issues on the swimlanes view by assignee (or reporter, if no one has been assigned):

In the future, you’ll be able to make custom filters.

Archiving

When you don’t need an issue anymore, you can archive it. It’ll go into the Archive, where you can choose to delete it permanently or restore it. From the Archive window, you can also choose to archive all issues marked as done or closed for more than 5 days.

My Issues

For maximum convenience, issues assigned to you are viewable in a separate window that easily fits into a side panel in Studio.

Upcoming

Player feedback

Click one button to install a system in your game that provides a UI that players can use to send in feedback, which you can then review and convert into an issue/task/bug with just a couple of clicks.

You can customize this however you want and it won’t be overwritten by the plugin - if there’s an update from my end, you’ll get the choice to overwrite or not. (There’s a version number on the ScreenGui in the form of an attribute. If I do change it, I’ll include instructions viewable in the plugin on how to update your version to be compatible.)

Sprints

Temporal organization for your team’s efforts. Create a sprint with a set start and end date, assign issues, and see at a glance if something is overdue. When a sprint ends, you’ll see a burndown chart showing how many points were completed versus how many were expected to be completed so you can adjust expectations as needed and stay on top of things.

Custom filters

There’ll be some default options, like filtering issues that have an “Is Child Of” link to a specific issue (so you can filter by Area) but I’ll also add a way to simply write a function in Luau to be used as a filter. The data structure for issues is very simple and has been designed to be directly encoded to JSON, so even novice programmers should be able to make something useful out of it.

Filtering and sorting My Issues

I’m honestly a little embarrassed that this isn’t in already. It’ll make the My Issues window much more useful on larger projects…

Whatever your team needs

I honestly really enjoy working on this plugin. If it’s lacking something that your team could really benefit from, just ask. Even if I don’t feel like it fits with the vision I have, I’ll probably add it anyway and make it a setting that’s off by default. You know, within reason…

[mr_smellyman]

The latest update includes filters for each team member, so you can just see issues assigned to one person at a time. You can also archive issues instead of deleting them, and from the Archive window, you have the option to archive all completed/done issues that haven’t been updated in 5 days.

Still to come:

• Adding links between issues, like “Is Child Of”, “Is Parent Of”, “Duplicates”, etc.
• Adding links to scripts, even at specific line numbers, so you can click a button to open the script to that line.
• Adding links to any instance in the datamodel
• Custom filters (so you could see only issues that have an “Is Child Of” link to an Area issue, for example.)
• Sprints
• Individual deadlines for issues, with reminders when an issue is coming due soon

[CDFII4 (CDFII)]

This looks sick and actually useful for bigger game studios in Roblox.
Everything can be seen at once. Few things I’d want to see:

• User can change background color / background image
• Issue widgets change background color with issue’s urgency (I guess arrows show how urgen the issue/bug is)

[mr_smellyman]

Solid suggestions, thanks.

Would you prefer if the plugin just respected Studio theme, or do you really want to set the colors yourself? I always use dark theme and kinda forget that some people use light theme, honestly.

[CDFII4 (CDFII)]

I thought that user could set any color, dark blue, black, etc. But maybe setting any color would interfier with other UI colors… Maybe white and black would be better idea, since these are standards in almost every plugin.

[mr_smellyman]

Issue links are now in the plugin. You can create links to other issues, to instances in your game, or to specific lines in scripts.

When an issue is linked to another, there’ll be a button to open the other issue on both issues.

There’s also a convenience field for making a child-parent relationship between issues: just set the Parent.

When you’re configuring a new link to another issue, you’ll get an autocomplete dropdown that initially shows all open issues. Start typing to search for others.

Hopefully this feature can help teams stay more organized. One intended workflow is creating an “Area” type issue (like an epic in Jira) and then set it as the parent of many other issues to indicate that those issues all relate to the same game mechanic. You can see this at play in my first screenshot on this post: I created a Guns issue, then more issues like “Pistol” and “Automatic rifle.”

[mr_smellyman]

Moved this to Community Resources. I hope more people can find it now - I think it’s genuinely useful and I’m using it heavily on my projects!

[AnisaSyntax (Anisa)]

Is this still being worked on? This could be an insanely useful tool!