How Tracker works

In this section, you'll learn how Yandex Tracker works and how to adapt Tracker to match your workflow.

Before you start, check the Yandex Tracker setup guide in How to configure a workflow in Yandex Tracker.

Yandex Tracker structure

To organize your team's work in Yandex Tracker, you'll need two key elements: issues and queues. Issues describe what needs to be done, while queues set the rules for working with issues.

Additional elements, such as components, issue boards, and dashboards, allow you to manage issues, monitor their status, and keep track of results. An overview of these features is given below.

Issue

In Yandex Tracker, the easiest way to manage your team's workload is to split it into smaller chunks called issues. These may include adding a new feature to your app, managing a support service request from a client, creating a new logo, or applying for a business trip.

An issue has a name, assignee, deadline, and other parameters. Issues may be linked or subordinate to each other.

If you want your team member to do some work, create an issue and make them the issue assignee.

Queue

Queues combine issues that share a common topic (be it a process, product, and so on) and let users configure a workflow for the issues. In each queue, you can set up the stages of working with issues, rules for automatic issue processing, and issue access rights.

Every team usually has its own workflow, so we recommend creating separate queues for your teams or company divisions. You can create queues for the development department, design team, or legal department. This way, a queue becomes a flow of issues to be handled by a certain team. For instance, if you need a new logo to be designed, create an issue in the designer queue.

Organizing your workflow in Yandex Tracker

A workflow for an issue usually involves multiple stages. For example, creating an issue, resolving it, approving its results, and completing the work.

In Yandex Tracker, each stage of an issue corresponds to a specific status. For example: "Open", "In progress", "Testing", and "Closed". To set up your pipeline around Tracker, you need to configure your workflow. The workflow defines the statuses an issue goes through from creation to completion and the rules for transitioning between those statuses.

Your workflow is linked to your issue queue. If you need to set up multiple workflows for different teams, you can create individual queues for them. You can also add multiple issue types to a single queue and set up an exclusive workflow for each type.

Yandex Tracker provides queue templates with pre-configured workflows for various processes to help you get started. A typical workflow looks like this:

You can create unique workflows tailored to specific issues. Try not to overload them with unnecessary statuses: the simpler the workflow, the easier it is to manage and work with.

Besides workflows, you can configure the following in the queue: access rights to issues, automated issue processing, integration with Yandex Mail and Yandex Forms, and more. These features allow you to flexibly configure queues to suit your team's tasks.

For examples of workflow setup in Yandex Tracker, see these sections:

Grouping and sorting issues

Grouping issues is useful, for example, to estimate the workload at different project stages or specify the scope of responsibility for teams and individual employees.

Yandex Tracker lets you group issues by various criteria:

  • Components help you group issues in a queue that relate to the same topic. When managing issues with components, you can set up a default assignee and access rights.
    For example, using components, you can classify requests to technical support.
  • Versions help you group issues within the same queue based on the product version they belong to.
    For example, to schedule a bug fix for a specific product release, you can specify the product's version in the Fix Version field.
  • A tag is a type of label that can be added manually to any issue. You can use tags to group issues by any attribute and then search for issues with preset tags. To add tags to an issue, edit the Tags parameter.

Planning your workload

There are multiple ways to plan your workload in Yandex Tracker:

Creating projects

You can think of a project as any work that has clear goals and a deadline.

Use projects in Yandex Tracker to combine issues that have a shared goal and must be completed within a specific period. You can set a global deadline or appoint a lead for the project. Projects may include issues from different queues.

Decomposing issues

To estimate the amount of work to be done to implement a project or create a new product version, decompose issues.

Decomposition is breaking larger project chunks into standalone issues and sub-issues. When the workload is broken down into smaller issues, it's much easier to evaluate their complexity and required resources, distribute the issues across assignees, and schedule deadlines. In Yandex Tracker, you can decompose your issues using links. For example, you need to implement a new feature in your product, which implies resolving multiple smaller issues. For such cases, you can create a New feature parent issue and link sub-issues to it.

Dividing your workload into sprints

If your product or project development is long-term and you have no fixed workload and deadline, you can plan your work using sprints.

In Scrum, sprints are small iterative cycles of development that last 1 to 4 weeks. When a sprint starts, your team assesses the complexity of issues stored in the backlog and selects the issues to be completed within the current sprint. Short iterations let you estimate deadlines for your work more accurately and, if necessary, change your priorities on the fly.

To use this planning strategy, create a Scrum issue board. Using the board, you can manage sprints, estimate issues with planning poker, and use burn down charts.

Planning deadlines using a Gantt chart

You can use a Gantt chart to plan and monitor deadlines for multiple issues on a single page. For example, when issues need to be handled in a certain sequence or when multiple issues are assigned to one employee.

You can create a Gannt chart for a project, a queue, or a list of issues found using a filter. The chart displays the work start and end dates as horizontal lines. You can set or change them right on the chart.

Monitoring results

In Yandex Tracker, you'll find tools that make it easy to see issue details at a glance, monitor progress, and keep track of results.

Dashboards

A dashboard is a page that helps users monitor the status of important issues and view statistics. You can customize your dashboard and add widgets that display data you wish to track. Widgets receive issue-related data automatically and display it as a list of issues, a table, or a chart.

See an example of setting up a dashboard in Collecting request statistics.

Issue boards

You can easily monitor issues assigned to your team on an issue board. Issues are displayed on the board as cards with basic issue parameters. Issue cards are placed in columns corresponding to issue statuses.

You can use the issue board for any issues, not necessarily related to software development. If you're not working with Scrum or Kanban, try using a basic board.

Subscriptions and notifications

Tracker sends you notifications about issue changes by default. You can configure the list of events that you want to get notifications for.

You can subscribe to notifications and not miss any updates in a queue, component, or issues of other users.

You can search for issues by any parameter or a combination of parameters using filters.

You can use system filters to quickly find your issues in Yandex Tracker.

If you often need to search for issues with specific parameters, you can create and save a custom filter. For example, you can use custom filters to find all issues in queues where you have the author or assignee status.

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Concepts