Bug-tracking software
As per one of my New Year’s resolutions (as most resolutions occur, after months and months of your conscious constantly pinging you on the matter), I am looking at bug-tracking software.
I would like something simple, web-based, but complete. I want to allow guests and new people to register and file bugs, track the progress of bugs, search through bugs/feature requests/solutions. Some of the projects are open-source, so it would be great to refer to/link the actual source, but there are also some closed-source (but free) projects.
Here’s a quick summary of what I see are 4 big players, actively supported bug-tracking systems out there. I’ve left out Sourceforge.net and Berlios since those are clunky, very advertising heavy, and typically also host the projects. I want to host my projects. And GForge (or whatever the open-source version is now called) is not a good solution.
Flyspray meets the simple category. I’ve used up to v0.97, and v0.99 is currently out, but I haven’t tried it. The interface features most things a bug-tracker should, multiple projects, categories, comments, related tasks, assigning etc. But when I first “walk-in” it doesn’t give me a quick run-down of all my assigned tasks, new tasks, etc. I know there are bugs in there, it’s just not really up-front about it.
Trac is a Subversion styled version of CVSTrac, and *much* nicer. It includes tickets, a wiki, and source browsing. All of these great features. The problems are: 1) setup is insane. I’ve spent about 8 hours on it, got it to finally run on a port when running the tracd daemon, but can’t set it up through a shared host and apache to just serve up, and 2) administration is via files. So it’s not the easiest to add new components, versions. etc. Apparently you can get professionally hosted trac installations.
Manstis Bug Tracking has a clean interface, very good “entry-point” where I can view all of my current bugs, new bugs, bugs by version, etc. No source browsing/linking however.
Atlassian’s Jira was recommended by independent devs at Evening at the Adler. I can say it looks very nice, is professionally supported and developed (and therefore costs $$ for closed-source projects). However, there are free licenses for open-source/community projects. It runs Java, and on a shared host, I can’t get past the 99% CPU usage on loading. My hosting company kills the process after about 1.5 seconds of that nonsense. Support must be from overseas and is sporadic, because the emails come in the middle-of-the-night and they haven’t really understood or resolved me issue.
So, to summarize, there are some very good options in all 4 of those projects. I am currently {attempting to setup, using, about given up on} each of those projects. I would like to use Trac, but am really banging my head on getting it setup and configured. Jira is all cool, but it’s proprietary (more power to them – looks like a good product), but I can’t mod anything and I don’t think it plays well on shared hosts.
My name is
January 5th, 2006 at 2:09 pm (#)
No mention of Bugzilla?
January 5th, 2006 at 3:06 pm (#)
Ah yes, Bugzilla, aptly named due to it’s size, complexity, and penchant for breathing fire and eating people.
I’ve never felt “comfortable” in Bugzilla. It’s just too much, and too daunting. It’s really for large, in-depth, lots of developers kind of projects. The average ‘user’ probably would see the initial screen and go “eep!” and run away.
My hope is to setup a bug-tracking system that the average user can file bugs and feature requests, and view solutions already presented in past bug reports. These people are fairly computer literate, but not developers. They fear the command line and can’t spell ‘compiler’. I like these people and especially their feedback.
So, Bugzilla is very good, but I think I’ll pass for the time being.
January 5th, 2006 at 3:48 pm (#)
I first tried Bugzilla years ago, and it was a pain to install and seemed like overkill for just a few users, so I choose Mantis at the time. Mantis was simple and worked well for our needs. Eventually, as we did have a large team, we tried Bugzilla again, and it’s been working great. So in conclusion, I pretty much agree with you assessment.
January 5th, 2006 at 5:46 pm (#)
Hi Andrew,
Great post — lots of good thoughts in there.
Sorry to hear you’ve been having trouble getting JIRA running on your shared host. And I’m also sorry that our devs haven’t been able to get a handle on your problem yet.
You’re right about them being overseas. Our main office is in Sydney (though we do have a small San Frnacisco office, where I work).
I looked through our support system and our mailing list, but I couldn’t find your ticket. If you can give me an issue number or a link to a forum post, I can follow up and try to get your questions answered.
If you have any other questions, feel free to email me directly at jonathan@atlassian.com.
Cheers,
jonathan@atlasssian.com
January 5th, 2006 at 5:52 pm (#)
I was poking around your site a little more and saw the Slim Devices Squeezebox on your gadget page. I’m a happy Squeezebox owner myself! I just got a pair of the new ones (SB3s) right before Christmas, and they’re very cool. The display is aa HUGE improvement over my old SB1s, and the wireless performance is much better as well. How have you liked yours?
January 10th, 2006 at 11:12 am (#)
Andrew,
Bug tracking software was a recent topic of discussion on the macsb listserv (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/macsb/). Apparently, you are not the only one struggling with Trac.
FogBugz (http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz) has gotten a lot of press but costs money…though $129 for one license is not bad.
If I was in this boat and just needed something simple, I’d be tempted to whip up something myself using Ruby on Rails. I actually just did this with a simple mailing list app and it worked out pretty well. It was mostly an excuse to learn Ruby/Rails and isn’t the most robust software ever written, but it works fine for me.
January 10th, 2006 at 11:42 am (#)
I’ve gotten Subversion up – but the layout doesn’t quite work for me. First, administration is via the command-line, which is sometimes just a pain. Second, you can only have “components”, where I’m looking for “Projects” and “Components” within a single database system.
I’m definitely looking more at rolling my own, but the idea of starting & supporting *another* project is daunting. I’ll probably move with Mantis and then later write my own interface using the existing Mantis DB, or with some simple migration. I need bug-tracking sooner than I can get to writing a bug-tracking solution.
And thanks for pointing out the Mac Small Business Yahoo! group. I didn’t know about it before.
February 6th, 2006 at 12:05 am (#)
This edition comprises of all the basic features of an Issue Tracking Software and is best suited for small to mid sized project teams.
Allows unlimited issue tracking
Configure Email notifications
Change history tracking
Configure local time zone
Informative dashboard
March 31st, 2006 at 10:27 am (#)
I’ve setup a Bugzilla server on an XP box, and the installation instructions were very accurate and helpful. It only took me about 3 hours to setup (after dealing with some internal company networking issues). After the initial setup, it’s quite easy to simplify the templates for general use. Although, it is kind of a pain to have to do that (I understand the bugzilla team is improving the interface)
Keep an eye out for a ruby on rails project to do this.
I just started with Ruby on Rails today, and I’ld like to do a project like this. (Technically my job description is embedded systems designer, so it’s not easy to justify this as a work project…)
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rbt/
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000263.html
http://www.43things.com/things/view/31973
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/140899
June 18th, 2007 at 1:32 pm (#)
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January 4th, 2008 at 4:59 am (#)
You can try Projistics Bug Tracker
Its a painless bug tracking software. Very user friendly!! And it have mostly all features that other tools offer.
http://www.projistics.com/BugTracker_Compare.asp