How To...

Ask a Question about COmanage

As with any tool, there may come a time when you seek guidance and the excellent documentation (if we may say so ourselves) is not quite providing what you need. There are several ways that you can get your questions answered:

• Submit a question to the COmanage Slack Channel. The #incommon-comanage Slack channel includes users and the development team - a great audience for your questions. This method is a good one for quick and/or straight-forward questions. See the Email Lists and Slack Channels page for more information and to subscribe.
• Come to Open Office Hours. We have a monthly Open Office Hours that anyone may attend. There is no set agenda during these meetings, so they are perfect places to come and ask your questions. Meetings are generally the first Friday of every month at Noon Eastern (NYC), though please check our Newsletters for the latest details.
• Send an email to the comanage-users mailing list. Anyone on the comanage-users@internet2.edu mailing list can send a message to the list. While answers aren't usually as quick as they would be in the other two options, email can be a great way to explain a more complicated question, or to initiate a topic that you'd like to transition into a virtual in-person chat. See the Email Lists and Slack Channels page for more information and to subscribe.

File a Bug Report

Bugs happen, and we want to know when they do! Given the large number of use cases that are addressed by COmanage, it is quite difficult to test for every prospective bug that could exist in the code. As a result, day-to-day users of COmanage may discover features that are not behaving as they should. In these situations, we encourage users to file a bug report so that we can explore options for addressing the issue.

CHECK.

When you first recognize a problem, a great starting point is to check the list of reported issues in the COmanage Issue Tracker to see if someone else has already reported the issue. The benefits of doing so are twofold - first, you may discover that the issue has already been addressed and a fix is available in a newer version of the software. And second, even if the issue has not yet been addressed, you can review what has been submitted, watch it for updates, and add additional details as comments.

See this Jira documentation for information on how to Watch, Vote for, and Comment on existing issues.

REPORT.

If the issue you have discovered has not been reported, you can create a new one:

1. Navigate to the COmanage Issue Tracker (link above). The tracker uses the tool Jira. (If needed, see the Jira documentation.)
2. Log into Jira using the link in the upper right corner. If you don't have an Internet2 Jira account, you will need to follow the following steps one time to create one:
   1. Register for Internet2 Identity Services. (Instructions. NOTE: This process uses COmanage Registry, so you will see it in the screen shots even though they are not about the Registry tool.)
   2. If you are still unable to sign into Jira, file a ticket by emailing help@incommon.org, and request to be added to the Jira users group so that you can file issues in the COmanage Project. You should mention the email of the account that you just created in the previous step.
3. Once you have signed in, click the “CREATE” button in the blue bar at the top of the screen.
4. Fill in the form to describe the issue that you have found. Please be as specific as possible, including screenshots, URLs, the browser and COmanage version that you’re using, and what happened before and after the issue. IMPORTANT TIPS:
   1. Make sure that the "Project" field is "COmanage (CO)" so that it comes to us
   2. Set the "Component" field to area where you found the problem: Registry, Registry Plugin, or Match
   3. Set the "Effects version" field to the version of the tool that you are using.
   4. Include any stack traces, screen shots or other details to help us recreate and understand the problem.
5. Use the same method as listed in "CHECK" above to watch, or comment on your issue once it is created.

STAY INVOLVED.

Did you know that you can submit code to address the issue that you found? If that option is available to you, we recommend that you review the process for Contributing to COmanage before you get started. But, even if contributing code is not for you, it’s a good idea to log into Jira, and “watch” the issue that you submitted so that you receive notifications when it is updated.

We also recommend advocating for your issue in Open Office Hours. As with everything, there are constraints on our resources, and we prioritize the things that have the largest community support and impact. If the issue affects multiple users and user groups, it is more likely to be addressed quickly.

We look forward to your bug reports!