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What feature do you look for in a modern bug tracker?

7 points by anoopks ↗ HN
I am planning to work on a bug tracking software this weekend - mainly as a hobby and to get my hands dirty on grails rather than with a profit motive - so probably will be open source.

But before jumping into development, I would like to know what all features that developers crave in a bug tracker - other than the most obvious features - adding bugs, changing status and reporting.

I you have an itch in your current bug tracker, i will be happy to hear that.

Thanks a lot for your time!

7 comments

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mariocesar
Something like middlewares or post-signals, when you post a ticket or get a new revision, or just any kind of event.

This way I can program an alert or an action when someone file a ticket about a component, or create a block for the next release on the deployment system if there is more than one bug ticket on the current release. Or just, send me an email of the tickets for a specific component that involves code I wrote, using some regexp or just looking for properties on the ticket.

It's just annoying have to get alerts and notifications of everything, or miss history of tickets you are not subscribe. I will really love to have a bug tracker that allows me, to be more sophisticated about what to do after someone post a new bug.

anoopks
Person reporting a bug often will not be having knowledge of the source code, right? So the best he/she can do is to assign the bug against a particular component. Will it help you if you can subscribe to a particular component rather than getting notified of all bugs?
mariocesar
Yes! and No! I am using trac right now and this the sort of things I want to avoid, instead of over-describing all my tickets, I would like to have an smart/programmable middleware that can notify users using some logic.

An example, someone create a ticket and later commit this with Git:

rev 1 "Workaround for fixing Z stuff, as last X library update breaks the code. fixes #1001"

I would really like to have the power to catch this event and inspect the manifest of the commit and if this is fixing a ticket for a part of the code I am aware other writers had been made changes, and send notifications to them, or even better change the ticket to status to "waiting approval" to the first author of that part of the code.

It's not about making notifications, or adding more describers to tickets, it's about let me "teach" the bug tracker how to behave on a certain case.

I will 100% use some bug tracker that let me easily hack him to do that.

mariocesar
Also a Restful API! to be able to create my own clients to create/edit tickets, or get the streams of any objects by just doing:

GET /api/1/tickets/assigned_tickets.json

That would be awesome!

anoopks
okay so RESTful API support - check!
tfitzgerald
This isn't really an itch because my current bug tracker does this already but being able to update issues with svn/mercurial/git commits is a great feature to have.
anoopks
Yeah, i already have an idea to have hashtags supported to in commit messages and pull them into the bug tracker as comments for the defect.

Can you please elaborate how your bug tracker supports this. And also why you don't find it usable?