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Poll: What do you use to track your bugs?

49 points by toast76 ↗ HN
What tools do fellow hackers use to track their bugs, issues, features and client/user feedback. Do you like it or hate it? If you don't use one, why not?

EDIT: As some of you may know, we're building a bug tracking tool of sorts (actually something a lot different to all the tools listed). The point of this poll is to find out what folks like us are currently using. Your input would be greatly appreciated!

75 comments

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mindcrime
Bugzilla. I wouldn't say I love or hate it, but it works and it's what I know. The biggest downside is that I'm not a Perl hacker, so if I wanted to hack on BZ, I'd have to take the time to learn Perl. Luckily I've never felt much of a need to modify Bugzilla. It just works.
nash
SD (Simple Defects) is more choice when I can. Distributed and works pretty well, and not too complex.
jesstaa
Post-It notes and 'drop everything and fix it now.' If it's not important enough to fix now, then it's alright if we forget it.
vyrotek
I like the Post-It note strategy.

Especially when all the notes are on a public window/wall. This way everyone can see the 'queue' of stuff and is a good reminder to re-prioritize constantly.

iamclovin
We use GitHub Issues. It's very barebones but ties in very nicely with our source control site of choice: GitHub, and there is no need to context-switch.
yan
I use GitHub's issue tracker
diziet
"Stop doing everything and fix it" along with basecamp to-do lists for the other, non critical bugs.
syaz1
Basecamp is awesome if a lot of people involved are non-technical. They tend to get dizzy looking at Jira/Trac.
SoftwareMaven
I am technical and I get dizzy looking at Jira. The product has some great capabilities, but they REALLY need to optimize the UI for particular user personas and not just puke every feature on the screen.
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a5seo
TrackJumper - simplest tracker I've found http://trackjumper.com/
damoncali
Thanks for the mention. I'm about to release a new UI based on initial customer feedback (no new features, though - just more intuitive/prettier). Should be deployed in a week or two.
pufuwozu
I work for Atlassian so I'm biased ;)

Good to see another Australian company taking on the software development market. Especially good to see that the company is partially funded by the Atlassian founders!

mmilo
someone's done their homework :)

Not so sure if we fall into the software dev category so much as the web dev category as we're really only supporting tracking on websites and web apps.

boyter
Mantis. Once I minimised most of the fields it looks fine. The easy of deployment is a point in its favour as well.

What I really want is a cut down JIRA written in PHP (for ease of deployment). If might just write it one day.

rabidsnail
Gmail. Better than any bug tracker I've used aside from Pivotal.
hajrice
+1 on that. I also got into Taskforce recently and am really liking it.
warp
For musicbrainz.org we're using jira. I'm not particularly happy about that, mostly because jira is not open source/free software (and musicbrainz is). Otherwise no complaints, jira does everything we need it to do, and apart from some interaction design issues does it quite well.
Micheleromano
Email -> stop development and fix -> reply to email archive and hope you don't hear about this issue again. But looking into implementing FogBugz (or whatever recommendations come up)
nuclearsandwich
I voted lighthouse because that's what we use at Nowmov but for personal projects I use [Bugs Everywhere](http://bugseverywhere.org) It's a simple command line tool that syncs to a file in your software's repo. Simple + Portable = LOVE.
mmoulton
We primarily use the GreenHopper plugin to interact with JIRA. This allows us to both track new development and defects in an agile friendly way, without the need to maintain all the index cards.
cowpewter
Grooveshark uses Bugzilla. There are things about it we all absolutely hate, but it does the job, which is more than I can say for anything else we've tried.
haberman
Google Code -- I'm surprised it's not listed. I recently had to decide between GitHub's issue tracker (I'm already using GitHub for source code hosting) and Google Code, and almost everyone I could find that had an opinion said Google Code was much better.
sigil
What? No RT?
Terretta
This struck me as odd as well. In our RT, we have ~ 200,000 "ad hoc" issues tracked to date by a team distributed across three continents and for thousands of customers, with no complaints.

Request Tracker by Best Practical is an amazingly flexible product, straightforward, yet easily tweaked into whatever workflow most any organization could need.

That said, we use TRAC for software project management and project-based issue tracking.

holri
Emacs http://orgmode.org/ in combination with http://mercurial.selenic.com/
alexfarran
Me too. Org mode works very well as a personal bug/task tracker but I don't know how I'd use it for collaborative work.
holri
yes, maybe mercurial is a way to share org files, but I'd go for a centralized database tracker for team tracking. But for personal tracking, I just love org. Fast and flexible.
__david__
So I've been using "ditz" on a few projects and I quite like it. It's about the most minimal bug tracker you can get, but I like that the bugs get checked into your scm, right along with the code. I also like that I don't need to launch a browser to add or edit bugs. It fits in beautifully with distributed VCSes like darcs or git.
masonmark
YouTRACK--a keyboard-friendly fast fast FAST bug tracker from JetBrains (of IntelliJ fame).

http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack

After I gave up the concept of tracking bugs and doing feature planning in the same app (sounds great but has never worked in practice), this tracker became my default for any projects where I have a say in the matter.

We moved from JIRA because administering a JIRA installation is practically a full-time job. Have also used Fogbugz, Redmine, Mantis, Bugzilla over the years, so that list is my main basis for comparison. I hate YouTRACK less than those.

Edit: I see they are now offering a free hosted version for the first half of 2011.