Description

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Patch Pilot

Plan it. Fix it. Ship it.

Patch Pilot brings structured product development and release management directly into Invision Community 5. It gives your community and product team one shared workspace for collecting feedback, planning work, managing development workflows, preparing releases, and communicating progress.

Community members can report bugs, suggest features, and follow the work that matters to them, while Product Teams retain control over internal planning, assignments, verification, release readiness, and publication.

What It Does

Patch Pilot organizes development around three connected areas:

• Products provide dedicated workspaces with their own teams, permissions, configuration, roadmap, known issues, and releases.

• Work Items capture bugs, features, improvements, tasks, and documentation work using configurable fields and workflows.

• Releases bring planned work, readiness checks, version history, and customer-facing release notes together.

Every Work Item belongs to a Product, follows a defined workflow, and can contribute directly to a Release.

Key Features

Product Workspaces and Teams

Create dedicated workspaces for each application, service, plugin, theme, or other deliverable you manage.

• Product directory with cover photos, icons, descriptions, owners, and status

• Public and permission-restricted Products

• Product-specific teams organized by configurable roles

• Public Product Team directory with member profile cards

• Front-end Product management for authorized team members

• Product submission and approval workflow

• Safe default access permissions applied during Product creation

• Product archiving, restoration, and guarded deletion controls

Flexible Work Item Tracking

Track the different kinds of work involved in maintaining a Product.

• Bugs

• Feature requests

• Improvements

• Development tasks

• Documentation work

• Configurable Work Item Types

• Priorities and optional severities

• Public and Product Team-only structured fields

• Assignee and verifier tracking

• Target Release, due date, and estimate planning

• Affected In and Delivered In version history

• Work Item participants

• Internal Product Team notes

• Related, duplicate, blocking, dependency, backport, and follow-up relationships

• Immutable Change History

Each Work Item Type can control whether public submissions, planning votes, severity, roadmap placement, and other features are available.

Configurable Workflows

Build development processes that match the way your team actually works.

• Reusable Workflows

• Ordered Workflow States

• Public roadmap-stage mappings

• Directed state transitions

• Role, group, reporter, assignee, and verifier authorization

• Required assignee, verifier, Release, delivery record, or verification gates

• Transition notes with meaningful prompts and descriptions

• Audited state changes

Patch Pilot includes practical starting workflows for bugs, features, simple tasks, and documentation.

Native Community Participation

Patch Pilot’s Work Items use the native IPS content framework rather than operating as an isolated external tracker.

• Native comments and reply forms

• Reactions and comment moderation

• Follow and Share controls

• Content reporting

• Hide, approve, pin, feature, and lock support

• Search and activity-stream integration

• Planning votes through the Support This Work Item action

• Inline, email, and push notification preferences

• Per-Product comment moderation settings

Public submissions can be enabled by Work Item Type, allowing customers to report an issue or propose an idea without becoming members of the Product Team.

Work Item Board

The Work Item Board provides a focused view of current development activity.

Filter and organize Work Items by:

• Product

• Work Item Type

• Workflow State

• Priority

• Severity

• Target Release

• Submission and update date

• Assignment and other planning information

Rows include clear type and state indicators, planning-vote totals, comment counts, and submitted and updated timestamps.

Release Planning and Readiness

Releases are first-class records with their own lifecycle and planning information.

• Release channels and version numbers

• Planned, active, released, and archived Releases

• Target and released dates

• Release manager assignment

• Public or internal visibility

• Planned and resolved Work Item totals

• Completion progress

• Automated blocker detection

• Release Readiness Review

• Audited launch overrides

The readiness panel helps answer the most important release question: What is preventing this Release from being delivered?

Release Checklists

Turn repeated release procedures into reusable checklists.

• Reusable checklist templates

• Ordered required and optional checks

• Release-specific checklist snapshots

• Assignees and completion notes

• Checklist progress bars and completed/total statistics

• Work Items linked directly to individual checks

• Resolved/total linked-work progress

• Warnings when completed checks still contain unresolved work

• Required checks enforced as Release blockers

Work Items can be linked to checks from either the Release checklist or the Work Item form, keeping the process convenient for the team.

Release Notes

Compose polished customer-facing Release Notes from completed Work Items.

• Configurable Release Note Sections

• Work Item Type-to-section suggestions

• Draft revisions

• Generated entries from approved Delivered In work

• Editable customer-facing snapshots

• Manual entries

• Entry ordering and exclusion

• Deliberate source refresh

• Immutable published revisions

• Correction drafts without destroying previously published history

Internal Work Item descriptions, staff notes, assignments, and other restricted information are kept out of public Release Notes.

Public Roadmaps and Known Issues

Keep customers informed without exposing internal planning data.

• Optional public Product roadmap

• Configurable roadmap stages

• Per-Work-Item roadmap visibility

• Publicly approved Work Items only

• Customer-safe roadmap cards

• Dedicated Known Issues view

• Permission-aware links and Product navigation

Internal estimates, assignments, discussions, private descriptions, and non-public Releases remain protected.

Product-Specific Configuration

Every Product can begin with administrator-managed baseline definitions while still adapting to its own needs.

Authorized Product managers can work with Product-specific:

• Roles

• Release channels

• Priorities

• Severities

• Work Item Types

• Structured Fields

• Release Note Sections

• Release Checklist Templates

Unused definitions can be hidden without deleting their history. Supported Product-created definitions can also be submitted to the Definition Library, where administrators may adopt them as baseline or optional definitions for future Products.

This allows individual Products to evolve without exposing another Product’s private configuration or weakening administrator control.

Dashboards and Notifications

The Product Dashboard provides an overview of activity across everything a member can access.

• Product status summaries

• Upcoming Release targets

• Personal assignment and verification queues

• Blocked work

• Recent permission-safe activity

• Product Team workload information

• Pending Product approvals for authorized reviewers

Notifications cover assignments, verification, workflow changes, due dates, planning escalations, managed Releases, watched Work Items, and watched Products.

IPS-Native Design

Patch Pilot is designed to feel like part of Invision Community.

• Native content

• Native comments

• Native moderation

• Native following

• Native sharing

Use Cases

Patch Pilot is well suited for:

• Software communities collecting bug reports and feature requests

• Application and plugin developers managing public roadmaps

• Product teams coordinating development and verification

• Support communities turning customer reports into planned work

• Teams preparing structured release checklists

• Developers generating clear Release Notes from completed work

• Organizations balancing public participation with private internal planning

• Communities managing several independent Products from one installation

AdminCP Areas

Patch Pilot provides dedicated AdminCP management for:

• Products, permissions, teams, lifecycle, and approval

• Product Roles and capabilities

• Release channels, priorities, severities, Work Item Types, Structured Fields, Release Note Sections, and checklist templates

• Workflows, states, transitions, and roadmap stages

• Product-submitted Definition Library reviews and adoption

Why It Stands Out

Patch Pilot is more than a bug tracker placed inside a community. It connects community feedback, Product Team planning, configurable workflows, verification, release readiness, and public communication in one continuous system.

Members can participate using their existing community accounts, while Product Teams receive the structured controls needed to move work from its first report through planning, development, verification, and final release.

Track the work. Prepare the release. Deliver with confidence.

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