HN Explorer

Poll: What bug tracking software do you use?

44 points by ErrantX ↗ HN
As requested by tmpk: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901314

"Which of the following do you use in your job/start-up: Also, if you could provide the rough number of users that use your particular bug tracking system installation that would be helpful."

(I added a few extra of my own too)

73 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] thread
buro9
I use Target Process for managing the entire development process. We're using Scrum as our process, and surfacing bugs within the same tool is a no-brainer. I like that I can identify bugs from changes (product backlog) effectively, and that I can take a bug and convert it to a user story if the scope of the bug justifies it.

It also comes with a helpdesk that allows features and suggestions be fed in.

In my opinion, whatever is handling your development process would ideally handle your bugs too. If the bugs aren't up there and visible as something you need to do before anything else then you don't have control of the quality of your products.

http://www.targetprocess.com/

Requires .Net, ISS, etc.

We have: Users: 7 Feature requestors: 8 Product owner: 1 Bug reportees: Thousands (anyone from any of the clients where our software is implemented).

Used in the past: Trac, Request Tracker ( http://bestpractical.com/rt/ ), FogBugz.

huyzing
Pivotal Tracker
costan
Same here. 4-5 people, at most 3 / project.
utku_karatas2
PT shines where most other options fail. I don't want to organize my priorities by setting fields in some dreary form, I just want to drag&drop. (If only it had sub-stories.)
larrywright
It also has the added benefit of letting you see (and prioritize) bugs and features in the same place.
ErrantX
I added it as an option; seeing as it seems popular.
arram
I use FogBugz at Justin.tv. It's well made.
roam
Sifter: http://sifterapp.com/
oneplusone
sifter is amazing and it has one of the best blogs I have read.
jeremyw
Notable that in his year of public (blog) development, many of Sifter's visual techniques had widespread pickup in other SaaS tools. I hope he keeps innovating his design language.
adrinavarro
http://flyspray.org/
CraigBuchek
Ditto. Pretty simple to install and configure. Looks decent, and works for me. Has some minor issues, and could use more integration with other tools. But only took a few minutes to set up on my LAMP server.
SwellJoe
We use Drupal project_issue for all of our projects (including Webmin). It's not perfect, but it serves our needs pretty well.
amouat
We used the tracker in GForge AS. We used it on two sub-projects, one with 2 developers and a manager and one with around 8 members of varying technical expertise.

The problem I have is how do you your tracker data out at the end of the project, for archival or moving to another tracker?

Do any trackers provide a simple export to XML?

shib71
Jira

Internally - 10, bespoke project stakeholders - up to 100 at a time, community developers - 100s (we've open sourced our core framework).

rg3
Previously it was called Telelogic Change. Now it's called IBM Rational Change or something like that. Users in the thousands. For personal projects I use whatever the hosting service provides me (GitHub, BitBucket, SourceForge, etc).
timanglade
I've been using Unfuddle for all of my projects for a few years. We have a few projects and around 10 users. Works wonders.
shabda
Same. Please add unfuddle to the options. A lot of people use it.
tom
We love Unfuddle! Not too complicated, no too simple. Pleasantly integrated.
bendtheblock
What's the bug tracking like in GitHub? Considering using it for source control - and if it's fully integrated with bug tracking that would be a real bonus.
pwmanagerdied
It's pretty simple/minimalistic. Here's their summary...

    * Deal with your issues just like you deal with email (fast, JavaScript interface)
    * Create and apply labels to issues to assign to users or categorize
    * Drag and drop issues to prioritize them
    * Vote on issues that you want to see tackled
    * Search, sort, and filter
    * Close issues from commit messages
    * Keyboard shortcuts
...from their blog post about it: http://github.com/blog/411-github-issue-tracker . It's also got a screencast there. If you'd like to see what it looks like from a user's perspective, here's the issue tracker for the issue tracker: http://github.com/defunkt/github-issues/issues :P
sant0sk1
Looks like they have a lot of open issues on the issue tracker ;)
arantius
Started using it recently. I'm finding that it's very limiting. It has very few features. For instance: no fixed/duplicate/wontfix/etc resolve status. Just "closed".
bajsejohannes
Jira, with about 500 developers. It is quite slow with this many developers. Apparently Atlassian has developed their own database query engine, and use the database only as simple storage. This makes it very hard to optimize for our internal developers. (Note: I know very little about the details - just that it is slow)
nixx
At work, we use TeamTrack - I wouldn't recommend it, it has a pretty horrible interface.

Previously I used FogBugz, which was a joy to use, how I miss it now!

ctrager
I apologize for being...Microsofty...but I use (and am the author of) BugTracker.NET. It's a free and open source bug tracking app for ASP.NET. In style and philosophy, it's closest to FogBugz.

This weekend I just finished getting the git and mercurial integration working. My eyes hurt.

More info about BugTracker.NET at http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html.

ErrantX
I added it in the list too :)

It's always interesting to see the writers of these tools "in person"! Thanks for posting.

bmichel
I use retrospectiva: http://retrospectiva.org/overview. It's a trac-like written in Ruby on Rails, but with multi-projects and git support. And I personnaly find that retrospectiva looks nicer than trac. The AgilePM extension is a also a great plus for us.

EDIT: We are a team of 8 people using it, 2-4 per project.

ErrantX
Well..

I use BitBucket. It's not the best per-se but as I almost exclusively use Mercurial and host on Bit Bucket it makes sense.

I am not sure I would recommend it for serious projects; the hosting is stellar (and hg rocks as SCM :D) but if you have the time to integrate with Lighthouse or other such apps it's probably worth it.

jespern
I'd love to get some suggestions on what you think would make it a better tracker!
ErrantX
Wicked! Well....

Some sort of "roadmap" feature. The ability to manually mark a revision as being relevant to the ticket (like the auto feature you have). When a revision (or revisions) are related to a ticket display a prominent, separate, link(s) to them in the ticket. Due date and importance for tickets. Highlight the importance in the list view (e.g. urgent = red etc.). When a revision is "tagged" in the mercurial repository create a link to a "changelog" that lists fixed issues for that tag name (if it exists: version or milestone - or even a separate tagging system).

That's just a few off the top of my head. (sorry; I always seem to be dissing you guys :( not intentional)

subbu
I have built my own. It took about 4 hours to build a workable first draft with all those free Rails plugins available. Now I customize it bit by bit whenever there is a need.
dan_sim
We use our own tracker at http://www.timmyontime.com . Actually, this is not a bug tracking app but a project monitoring one. We have a concept of "notes" and they can be anything you want : bugs, todos, ideas, etc. With that app, a bug becomes a task and you can do time-tracking on that task or comment on it.
JoeAltmaier
wes kind of ran down using Bugzilla; too much email noise. Now we keep a text file, review occasionally. Works for 12-person company, 6 developers.