[lug] Request/bug tracking systems--suggestions for small team

[Andrew Diederich]

On 2/15/08, Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > One suggestion is Trac.  Would that meet my requirement for
> > a well-established, versatile and relatively light-weight
> > system?  I understand it can be closely integrated with
> > Subversion.
> >
>
> I've used Trac, and I liked it.  The integration with SVN is good, too.
>
> Our test group wanted a configurable bug-state flow, which it didn't have,
> so we're using Bugzilla instead.  This is also free, but not light-weight.
> (Trac was slated to get the flow stuff in the next release, so it may have
> it now.)

For free tools, I've used trac and flyspray.  What I liked about trac
was the tie into svn, well maintained, and easy to use.  What I didn't
like about trac was it was a little hard to get the reports out of it
I wanted, and closing bugs was a single step.  I prefer having the
devs mark a bug as "fixed" and QA marking it as "verified."  I also
restricted the users, so that when you assigned bugs it was in a drop
down list.  There wasn't a way to remove users from that list, though.

Flyspray's multi-projects didn't work very well.  I wanted to let a
development partner see some bugs, but not all.  That was advertised
functionality that didn't work.  Flyspray is very mysql focused (or
was a year ago), and I tended to use postgreSQL.  I don't think there
was a good way to extend the report functionality.  It's also php,
which some people have strong feelings about.

When trac gets better bug flow and better / more configurable reports,
it'll be really good.  That may require database changes to keep more
history in the database.  I'd use it again in the state it was a year
ago, though.

The kind of reports I was looking for are getting graph (or table)
outputs over a specified time period.  So, I don't want just to know
how many bugs are open now, but how many were open for each day last
week.  And closed, fixed, rejected, etc.  As a release goes on you
should be able to track "goodness" by overlaying open bugs and new
bugs.  Open bugs will make an upside down U, and after you've turned
that corner the product should be getting much closer to shippable.

-- 
Andrew Diederich