Chapter 6. Incident Management

Table of Contents
Life Cycle of an Incident
New Activity (Incident)
Follow up
Complete Incident
Reopen Incident
Close Incident

To facilitate a common understanding of incident management we start out with the Life Cycle of an Incident as it is implemented by openCRX. The discussion of the various operations available to manage state transitions also covers the state transition types used to further specify state transitions. Examples given in the chapter Use Cases should be helpful to understand the concepts.

Life Cycle of an Incident

With openCRX you can describe, qualify, group and categorize incidents in many different ways, empowering you to effectively manage incidents. Before diving into the details it is important to understand the life cycle of an incident (also known as work flow) as shown in the figure below:

Figure 6-1. Life Cycle of an Incident

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An incident is always in one of the following states:

N/A
newly created incidents are in the N/A state until they are followed up for the first time
Open
incidents are Open as long as they are not Complete, i.e. the Open state indicates that the respective incident requires attention/work
Complete
the Complete state indicates that incident handlers have completed work on this incident
Close
the Close state indicates that the Reporting Contact closed the incident

Even though it's possible to manually change the state of incidents, we strongly encourage you to use the available operations to change states because this allows you to pick an appropriate state transition type. The following predefined operations and state transition types are built into openCRX:

New Activity (Incident): the operation New Activity is used by the Reporting Contact to create a new incident (set activity type to Incident); newly created incidents are put into the N/A state
Follow up: use this operation to put an incident into the Open state; state transition types include acknowledge, add note, assign, confirm, feedback, and suspend
Complete Incident: incident handlers use this operation to put an incident into the Complete state; state transition types include duplicate, fixed, invalid, later, moved, remind, won't fix, works for me
Reopen Incident: if the Reporting Contact is not satisfied with the resolution of an incident use of this operation puts the incident back into the Open state
Close Incident: if the Reporting Contact is fully satisfied with the resolution of an incident use of this operation closes the respective incident, i.e. the incident is put into the Closed state

The following sections discuss these operations and the respective state transition types in more detail.