Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Bug Tracking System of a Dream

This is obvious that the main purpose of any bug tracking system is to keep list of defects in software, app or a website. Any BT does this of course but what is really needed for a small group of developers and what is currently available?
First of all I hate when to submit a new bug you have to go through million steps and fill various parameters you have to fill regardless you need them or not. In the ideal world, submitter should paste a screenshot, enter a title, enter tag(s), optionally add a description (just in case info to recreate the issue is required) and that's it. Ok, but let me dream a little more.. it should have a nice looking customizable UI, work fast and finally it should be free.

As with any key choice I usually review all available options, install, try them for a few weeks (at least) on real projects and see if they correspond to my expectations or not. Said that, I don't really have an answer, URL, name, brand..  (i.e. I have not found a very good bug tracking system which would fit all those requirements) but within these posts I just want to share my experience and opinion on the bug tracking systems I have used.

One more thing for the preamble. I really appreciate work of developers, especially those who develop open-source and free products, and I realize that "you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth".

Mantis



Well, this was the first bug tracking system we used in my company for a very long time. It's free and seems a very popular one but every time I needed to tie its UI to look custom (like to match company's or project's website) this became a real pain. The problem is that guys started developing this project in ~2002 and the code is so outdated, very hard to customize (i.e. no MVC, strange looking CSS, etc).

If you use Eclipse IDE you may consider trying a connector for Mantis which helps to add and view issues directly from the development environment. Other good things about this product is that they have changelog and roadmap functionality which worked good for us.

Using this BT you get a stable system to track your bugs, but you may forget about AJAX & nice UI.

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