Working With Issue 🐞 Tracking List In SharePoint

In the previous article, we saw every detail of the Discussion Board List template in SharePoint. Now, in this article, we are moving one more step ahead and learning about the Issue Tracking list template provided by SharePoint. In this article, we will see what the Issue Tracking list is in SharePoint and how this can be helpful in your scenarios. We will cover the following points.

Background
Introduction to Issue Tracking Lists
How to create an Issue tracking List?
How to add issues to the Issue Tracking List?
How to respond to the issues?
Summary

Background

Issues are something that we don’t want to have in our product but there is always a case where an issue is faced and reported. So, consider that you have a software firm and you have a team of Project Managers, Developers,and QA. Now, the scenario is that you are a project manager and you want to track the developer’s work and QA’s work and software status. So, the process that is mostly followed is&

The developer develops the code
Submits the software to QA
QA tests it and reports the issues to the PM and the Developer via email
PM and Developer keep track of issues and fix them.

There is nothing wrong with this pattern. But what becomes complex is that PM doesn’t get updates on the actual status of the issues and to get the latest updates, he/she has to contact the developer or dig into all the emails. In order to solve this common problem, Microsoft SharePoint provides a list template that helps to track the issues. Let’s explore Issue Tracking further.

Introduction

Issue Tracking List is a template provided by Microsoft SharePoint, using which we can create an Issue List to be used to track the issues related to any project or any other stuff. Issue Tracking lists help the users to track down the issues, check the status of the issues, track who is responsible for these issues, and much other stuff.

Issue Tracking list can be used at the Help Desk System or any other customer support system where a customer has to report the issues with the product. It also helps the user to maintain the status of the issues like active or closed etc. Let’s check how we can create the Issue Tracking Lists.

How to create an Issue Tracking List?

In order to create an Issue Tracking list, please follow the below-given steps.

Step 1. Open the Site Content page by clicking on the "Settings" icon and then clicking “Site Contents”.

Site contents

Step 2. This will open the "Site Contents" page. Click on the “Add an app” icon from this screen.

Site work

Step 3. Search for the “Issue” in the search box and then click on the “Issue Tracking” icon link.

Your Apps

Step 4. Give the appropriate name to the list and hit the “Create” button.

Adding issues

Step 5. Your issue tracking list has been added.

Project issues

Step 6. Click on the list icon to open the list. When you hit the link, you will have the following screen.

New item

Here, you can see there are 3 Views available by default. The names of the views are

All Issues: Here, all the issues will be listed without any filters.
Active Issues: Here, only those issues will be listed which are currently active.
My Issues: This will list all the issues that are assigned to the currently logged-in user.

How to add an issue to the Issue Tracking list?

In order to add a new issue to the Issue Tracking list, click on the “new item” link on the list.

Active issues

When you click on “new item”, it will open an issue addition form.

How to respond to the Issues?

Consider you have got an issue, then just open the issue list and click on “My Issues”.

Respond

Here, you will see the issues assigned to you. Click on (...) and then “Edit Item”.

Version

It will open up the edit form. Just change the Status to “Resolved” or “Closed” and hit “Save”. And now your issues are resolved. So now when you click on “Active Issues”, you will not find any issues listed.

Edit

Summary

So, in this article, we have seen the basic details about Issue Tracking lists in SharePoint. We have seen how to create the Issue Tracking list, how we can add items to the issue list, and how we can edit the issues in the Issue Tracking list.

If you have any comments related to this article or any SharePoint concept, please let me know in the comment section. In the next article, I will explain the details of SharePoint Survey Lists.