Flag user as test participant

[Dan Munns]

Hi all,

We are rolling out some new software and it would be very useful to be able to flag certain users as testers for different software whenever they log a ticket so that these issues can be grouped together/reported on/assigned to the correct resource for resolution. 

I cant seem to find a way to do this without changing the BPMs though. As these rollouts are quite quick (completed within a couple of months) and the test users change a lot (different groups for different rollouts and additional users added at different stages of testing) changing all the BPMs they may log issues against for each rollout isn't really an option. 

I did try and have a custom button popup but user attributes are very limited there.

Is there an option anyone can think of? 

Thanks,

Dan

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Dan,

I'm guessing that at some point, the group of testers for a particular software package or installation need to be manually selected and put against something.  That something being a group, a request, a team, a connection on a request,  or tasks against the software asset.

Will you be having different test groups running at the same time? Is the rolling out of a new software package managed as a project or simply through a change request?  Or possibly the rolling out of software is managed on a board?  Possibly a few different ways to tackle this.  Maybe have QA authorisations at different points within the process where these testers are added as ad-hoc authorisers to accepted the quality.

[Dan Munns]

Hi James,

So for an example, at the moment we are in the process of rolling out O365 to all users. As part of that process we are removing the Office GPOs and moving to App Config. Currently there are 50 users in the group for O365 policy. I need to know which users they are if they log an issue with O365 (unable to open a file they used to be able to open in Office 2016 for example).

We have more O365 users than are in the test group (they are still using GPOs) so just them having O365 installed doesnt mean I need to know about it. At the moment I have to look into the Azure group to see if the user having an issue is in the group. To be fair I only looked at adding fields into the user account and didnt really think of software assets so that could be useful (my fault, I havent been spending as much time doing Hornbill config as I used to so not really kept up with things like I used to either).

There will, no doubt, be different groups running as test users for different deployments/projects/programmes etc. Rollouts for business infrastructure tend to be rolled out on a single change request, usually along the lines of "Deploy O365 to all users", the security config and everything else such as user groups, exceptions etc are all dealt with off the back of that one ticket and details logged in a central knowledge base if required.

I am not a fan of it but it is what it is I'm afraid. 

I was hoping to be able to have a little popup (like a button) on a ticket show up automatically if criteria such as User Account>Custom Fields>Attribute 8=O365_Test

I dont really want to have to add the details to a ticket manually, or edit a load of BPMs to capture it (if it can be helped). The main point of this is so that Service Desk open the ticket, see the flag and then assign the ticket to us (or any other owning team in the future) rather than trying to fault find something where the issue lies somewhere they dont have access.

Edit: I should point out that most users in the test group dont know they are. I have spent many hours (in my much younger days) fault finding things that didnt actually exist because a user said "Since I have been moved to this group 'x' doesn't work" only to find out it never worked in the first place. I dont do that anymore

[Dan Munns]

Sorry @James Ainsworth, forgot to tag you in the last reply.

[James Ainsworth]

On 1/11/2021 at 4:37 PM, Dan Munns said:

I was hoping to be able to have a little popup (like a button) on a ticket show up automatically if criteria such as User Account>Custom Fields>Attribute 8=O365_Test

We have the request notices that could be added to a request, but this would require you to add something to the workflow to check the attributes of the users, which I know you are trying to avoid.  I am looking into other ways of adding notices based on user attributes, but the work isn't scheduled to be done yet.

I'll keep trying to think of more ideas that could help. 

[Dan Munns]

Thanks @James Ainsworth