HN Explorer

Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team?

39 points by dtran ↗ HN
Hey everyone, My cofounder and I have been using a google doc + lots of dropbox documents to keep track of to-dos, feature roadmap, and bugs, but it's gotten to the point where we do need a real bug tracking system since our google doc spreadsheets are just a mess to sort through.

What's a good, lightweight bug tracking system for a small team (< 5 people)? I've used Bugzilla in the past, but that seems to be overkill and it's definitely not lightweight. Trac seems to be decent although I haven't really used it for projects. Anyone have good experiences with Mantis?

Thanks

66 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] thread
nostrademons
Post-its on a whiteboard.
dtran
You probably meant this as a joke, but I have a friend who is hyper-organized with all of her to-dos on a whiteboard... different sections are different things/different priority levels. Maybe we will hack together a Wii whiteboard Johnny Chung Lee style and use virtual post-its! (http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/)
m0nty
You probably meant that as a joke too, but I think a virtual whiteboard with Post-Its would be a great product. Colour-coded notes to indicate priority, clustering by physical location on the screen, larger text sizes for very-urgent-do-it-today tasks. You could draw lines on the whiteboard to show the relationship between notes, could have the ability to roll back to previous days to track history, attach files to Post-Its, etc, etc. I currently do something like this using index cards on a pinboard, and it works really well.
gaustin
I think it could be a great product too.

Anyone working on it and want help?

Anyone want to work on it with me?

projectileboy
stixy.com is exactly that. The usability is pretty good.
vog
Your advice is great, but it is too simple and too obvious to be used by any modern team. It is old-fashioned, without any noise and hype around it.

Fortunately, the guys at http://73primenumbers.com/ started a campaign to add the missing buzz.

nostrademons
My tech lead from two projects ago used post-its on a whiteboard, and one of the teams I work closely with still does. For search options, we used a 2D-grid, where the vertical axis was the component and the horizontal access was the state of done-ness (unassigned, being worked on, in code review, finished).

If you have a small, colocated team, this is basically ideal. There's low overhead, and the overhead consists of physically taking off a post-it and sticking it in the next column, which feels very satisfying. At a glance, you can see how done the project is - lots of post-its on the left means you have a while to go, lots of post-its on the right mean you're almost done. If you have components that need lots more attention, they'll show up as stragglers on the grid, and then you can either allocate more resources or cut the feature as appropriate. (In our project, that was usually self-allocation, because we didn't have particular engineers assigned to particular components, and each engineer was familiar with a few different components). If a lot of tasks get stuck in the code review stage, you know that it's time to lean on the code reviewers a bit.

fpotter
Try Pivotal Tracker. It's more geared for todos / feature stuff (and does it really well), but you can use it for bugs, too. If you're tracking more than 50 or so bugs, I could see wanting to use something else, though.
dtran
Thanks for the suggestion. I just had a funny experience - went there to register... said that my email was already registered... turns out I made an account on pivotal a while back but never used it haha. Will give it a shot. Thanks!
dtran
Hmm I don't like the interface - drag and drop is kind of clunky for these purposes
nick-dap
I keep bugs and do email/support via FogBugz, but when it gets down to crunch time I always end up back in Pivotal Tracker for my weekly to do. I work alone.

FogBugz email integration is top notch, but the time tracking and staying on target for a release is definitely tuned for a larger team. In "list of cases" view there isn't an immediate visual cue to what you can get done in time for a release. Going into reports you get nice graphs with confidence curves for the finish date of a release. Entirely overkill for a small team; possibly a life saver for a larger one. A side note, I was able to show a non technical person how to use FogBugz to work with email with surprisingly good results. The person found it a very natural transition from plain email and appreciated the case tracking capabilities of FogBugz.

Pivotal feels much more natural to me and always helps me stay on track. I can immediately see what I can get done this week and what I will have to push back or revise. I also find its 3 point system for estimating remarkably accurate. The tool has actually driven me to get things done as well, which is more than I can ask of any tracking system.

So,

FogBugz: a formal bug tracking system with excellent email integration and fine grained estimation and tracking.

Pivotal Tracker: a "to do" tracking system, with coarse estimation and tracking that works better for fast iterations and small teams.

blogimus
How lightweight are you talking? Are you looking for a hosted tool (like fogbugz) or are you definitely going to manage/host it yourself?

I've been using Jira, and there's a $10 version for small groups.

Whatever you chose, make sure of one thing: every tracked bug or task has a unique URL.

thomaspaine
Trac is great and plugs in really easily to SVN. It's at least worth playing around with since so many open source projects use it.

I wrote a Django middleware that uses Trac's xmlrpc plugin to automatically create Trac tickets for errors. I'm sure it's just as simple to do for whatever you're using.

bkrausz
I've used trac, bugzilla, and custom-rolled solutions and have found trac the be the best. It's missing some features (silly things like renaming a user...) but overall it's enough for most needs, and much simpler than bugzilla is.
dtran
Hmm, thanks thomaspaine, I think we're going to go with Trac since we're currently using SVN... I'm considering a move to git since I've really enjoyed using that for another current project, but it looks like there's hooks for git and trac as well.
sidmitra
Redmine, is a good alternative.
sidmitra
Or try Unfuddle, which is sort of like hosted redmine. They have a freemium model, free for 2 users, unlimited repos.
dtran
Wow I actually LOVE this hosted solution - minimal setup, easy to customize (can create versions/comps/severities with minimal effort. What really puts it over the top for me is the widget. I'm pretty sure that's going to 1.2x my productivity in terms of knocking out bugs =)
hlidotbe
We use Redmine here (~4 people) and it's great. Rails backed, lots of plugin if you need more and easily extendable.

It integrate cleanly with CVS, Git, Mercurial, SVN, ... and we'll even do invoicing with it in a few weeks.

There are paid hosting options if you don't want to maintain it yourself.

raytheon
I recently started using redmine (http://www.redmine.org) and only had good experiences with it. It's an open-source ruby on rails project management "framework". It supports everything you are looking for, and then some more, namely:

- roadmap for upcoming versions/features - dedicated site for documentation - wiki - forum - tickets - repository support

The repository support let's you do things like refer to a ticket in a commit message which then gets associated with said ticket (or even changes the status of the ticket as soon as you commit the bugfix).

I could go on and on... but you get the point.

Here's a demo where you can give some of the things a try:

http://demo.redmine.org/

1331
Flyspray is as advertised: "uncomplicated." If you want a simple system, it is worth a try. http://flyspray.org/
CraigBuchek
+1 for FlySpray. It's PHP-based, and pretty easy to install and set up. It does take a few minutes to set it up to add your desired Task Types (TODO, Bug, Feature Request, etc.) and Categories. But once you've done that, it's quite easy to use, and looks pretty good too.
Jim_Neath
I'm currently working on a bug tracker (http://purifyapp.com). I can send you a beta invite if you're interested? Also open to anyone else who fancies trying it out.

Email me at jim@purifyapp.com

jacquesm
We use trac. And it works really well, has a built in wiki for other bits and pieces that need remembering.
JarekS
Trac works pretty well also for our team.
peter_severin
I work alone but I still use Trac and couldn't be effective without it. The Wiki is excellent and I love the Subversion support and how you can cross-link everything.
epi0Bauqu
I just started using http://speckleapp.com/

It's relatively new, very lightweight, and made by HN member elliottkember, who is very open to feedback/suggestions.

elliottkember
I've been building Speckle (http://speckleapp.com) for a little while: a to-do list with multiple checkboxes per item. it's reasonably light-weight - I don't know whether it suits what you're looking for, but Id be interested to know what you think :)

Edit: epi0Bauqu beat me to it!

dtran
Reminds me a lot of doodle from the screenshot. Will check it out - maybe I'll start using this instead of Google tasks for my own personal to-dos since that usually is such a long list sitting on top of my google calendar that I can't see my calendar -_-
elliottkember
I hadn't seen Doodle before - it's quite interesting! A similar layout, but a different objective.

Maybe it's me, but I found it's quite hard to figure out what on earth Doodle is based on its homepage. That's why I like having an in-action screenshot on the homepage, and a "sign up with one click" button. Hopefully Speckle is a little more obvious.

scorpioxy
There's a difference between a bug tacker and an issue tracker.

Bugzilla works great as a bug tracker but is not a great issue tracker. Trac, the opposite.

From what you described, seems you're looking more for an issue tracker or a project planning sort of thing.

I've liked Redmine, though I haven't used it professionally yet.

huherto
Can you elaborate? What is the difference? Is it that an issue tracker is more general than a bug tracker?
scorpioxy
Yes, it would be more general. Although an issue tracker can be used as a bug tracker(look at Trac).

So typically, a bug tracker would be geared more towards programmers and software bugs, while an issue tracker is usually more friendly towards non-programmer users(so would include stuff like knowledge bases, wikis...).

In practice, the distinction is not as clear cut as the definition implies.

charliepark
You might check out Garret Dimon's http://sifterapp.com. I think it's what 37signals would make if they made bug-tracking software.
roam
I use Sifter and love the way it looks and works, but the lack of any kind of API is starting to get on my nerves.
andrewcooke
I haven't used it, but this is "interesting" - http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki

(I use Trac myself, and it's OK, but not wonderful - haven't found anything better, but will be trying Redmine after reading comments here).

[edit: also, you can do bug tracking with Google code, which I am surprised no-one else has mentioned]

Flow
I agree, Fossil seems very interesting. I'm just waiting for a chance to try it.
megamark16
I'm currently working on a web app builder called AppRabbit (http://apprabbit.com) and used it to create my bug/issue tracking system for tracking my progress with...it. I'm still working on finishing up a few fairly fundamental features, but you're welcome to try it out if you'd like a beta invite. Shoot me an email if you (or anyone else) is interested in seeing what it can do. admin@apprabbit.com.
chappi42
+1 for redmine

We (~7 people) migrated away from trac and use redmine for several projects with subversion and now git. Working very well since 3 years.

A friend of mine uses indefero and was happy with it. Link: http://www.indefero.net/open-source/

tophercyll
Our three man team recently took advantage of the FogBugz YC offer and gave it a try. There were some things we liked about it, but in the end it felt too heavy for us. It was more of a support ticketing system than an easy way for a small team to track their bugs (although it would probably be good if you had a lot of external users reporting bugs).

The other problem was that even a lot of custom tweaking, we never quite got the email subsystem working the way we wanted. We finally started using a plugin to make sure we all got emailed on every change, but then we got swamped because we couldn't figure out how to make it send only one email if you changed multiple fields on a ticket. It always wanted to send one for each piece of data that changed.

Before that, we'd been using a Google Docs spreadsheet, doing pseudo-joel-spreadsheet for project tracking and keeping a simple list of bugs.

Now we're using Wave and treating it as a digital whiteboard. It's got its share of bugs still, but I've been really happy.

We've got one wave where we do project tracking (including moving little name markers around, so we can all see real time what everyone is working on. And we've got another wave for bugs with same rules.

We don't put nearly as much info in our wave as we used to put in the spreadsheet (we did a lot of effort estimation and completion time tracking), but the simplicity may actually be helping us keep on top of it better.

And it's awesome to collaboratively rework our goals for each release and at any time we can just scroll through our bug list.

aero142
I know Wave has been much maligned, but I'm really excited about the potential as a base framework for other things, like a bug tracker/wiki/email/IM/design meeting/project planning all wrapped in one.
dtran
Hmm, I hadn't considering wave as a bug tracking system. Our google doc spreadsheet was already too busy, so I can't imagine Wave making that any better. Really interesting idea though - maybe useful to organize team sprints/small projects.
tophercyll
Yeah, we definitely had to trim down how much info we were storing. Obviously that was a sacrifice, but the upside was a lower barrier to entering a new feature or bug. We really do just treat it like a digital whiteboard (even to the point of posting pictures of our actual whiteboard until we can transcribe them). And the realtime collaborative editing kills a traditional wiki.
keefe
mylyn makes bugzilla a lot easier to use if you use eclipse.
briancary
Mantis is great. Easy to install and use. Definitely go with that if you're on PHP/MySQL. No need to fuddle with the rest.
shadow
Try Lighthouse, http://lighthouseapp.com/ Been using it and it's great
texel
Agreed. Not only that, but they have an awesome API. I've used it to write automation tools for our build/deploy process. Never underestimate the usefulness of a good API.