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

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Fri, 2008-02-15 at 13:50 -0700, Vince Dean wrote:
> Our small software team needs some sort of bug/request
> tracking system.

Funny you should mention this.  I'm working on an article on this
subject right now based on my own experiences with small teams and quick
setup and rampup for project management tools, including bug trackers
(soon Jon, soon :-)

> This is a small, in-house team of 3 developers who would be
> the main users of the system.  We could almost get away with
> a spreadsheet to track and prioritize our tasks, but we need
> something that is easily shared among us, probably web-based.
> It needs to be free, and relatively easy to install and
> administer.

These last three have been my requirements for three different sets of
projects (two companies and my own at-home development).  I started with
bugzilla long ago but it requires too much maintenance.  I wanted
something to drop down, start using and require little coding to keep
running.  My final choice is Flyspray (http://flyspray.org/).  It's easy
to install and has been easy to update with new versions.

> This does not need to be be usable by a larger user community.

It has user logins.  It's main downfall in this respect (as someone else
pointed out) is that it's not really possible to limit viewing of
specific projects.  Once you have view access to pretty much any
project.  However, I'm not running the absolute latest version so it's
possible this has been added recently.  And since it's PHP (which is a
pretty easy language to learn, IMHO) it's possible to extend on your own
for this.  It does use MySQL as the backend but I have no issue with
this since I use it for a number of other projects (most especially the
multitude of Wordpress installations I manage).

> Some reports might be useful for our managers, but this is
> secondary.  

Reporting in Flyspray is decent.  The next version promises much better
reporting.  I mostly use reporting to keep track of what was opened over
the previous period (re: month) and what was closed, per project.

> We mostly need to manage priorities among ourselves
> and make sure issues are not forgotten.  We need to
> track the basic facts about a task:  priority, status, description,
> assigned-to, subsystem, etc., with reports sorted by those
> attributes.

Flyspray should do most of this now though I'm not sure how good the
sorting is.  I create reports based primarily on issue status but you
can also sort on priority and severity, among other criteria.

> We don't require close linkage to the source code.  We don't
> necessarily need to associate a request with the code changes
> it caused.

I don't believe the current version ties directly into any source code
system though I use CVS and it wouldn't be hard to tie CVS into Flyspray
if I needed to.

> When we needed source control, Subversion was an obvious choice:
> widely used, free, well-respected, all the features we might
> need, but not too hard to use.  A "safe" consensus choice.

I know subversion is quite popular and I'm sure it's quite stable, but
when I tried it I found it far too difficult to secure compared to the
simplicity of CVS.  So I dropped it and went back to CVS.  Again, this
is for very small teams and relatively small projects (none are over a
100K lines of code so far).

> Are there any equally obvious choices for request tracking?

Lots of good options.  But I'm still quite happy with Flyspray after 3
years.

> 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.

Honestly, I've never liked the UI.  It's half wiki, half bug tracker and
not overly intuitive.  Just MHO of course.

> Suggestions?

Whatever tracker you use, be sure to tie it in with a wiki (I use
PmWiki, again because of the ease of installation and long term
maintenance).  The triumvirate of development today is:  source code
control system + issue tracker + wiki.  Toss in IRC (or similar) and a
developer blog (Wordpress) and you're pretty golden for distributed
teams.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               Ximba End User Software
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                      http://www.ximba.org
LFS UserID: 16857
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vision is the ability to see potential in the work of others.
Robert X. Cringley, "Accidental Empires"