Best Bug/Enhancement Tracking Tool Recommendation?

[Mike London]

Our project needs to be able to track, not only defects, but allow users, over the Web, to enter enhancement requests.

We installed BugZilla as a test, but it has the word "BUG" all over the place and isn't intuitive for a user.

What we'd ideally want is a bug/enhancement tracking system that lets you ...

1. Separate software projects by user login, so a given user can't see all the projects in the bug/enhancement tracking tool.

2. Not say "BUG" all over the place. We don't want to scare the users.

3. Not cost too much.

4. Run on Apache or IIS.

5. Be designed for users to enter enhancement requests and "bugs", as well as programmers to enter bugs.

6. Possibly customizable screens.

Other desired features.....

1. The ability to notify a customer when the status of the “issue” changes

2. Keyword search

3. Reports with sort and filter options

a. sort by status, priority, date entered, deadline

b. filter by user, status, priority, severity, version

4. Export report data to Excel

5. Issue ID numbering

6. Many of the same fields as bugzilla

a. status,

b. resolution status (pulldown list)

c. resolution explanation

d. severity,

e. priority

f. version

g. description

h. url

i. expected deadline

Optionally, I would like to be able to group several “issues” together into a parent issue (or task and sub-tasks) so that when all the sub-tasks are completed, the parent task can be changed to completed.

Could anyone please give me your thoughts on the best bug tracking and enhancement request tool you've used?

Thanks in advance!!!

- Mike

[Tim Holloway]

Bugzilla is extremely popular and I hate it. It presents an immense form that you have to select items from, and to me at least, it looked like its best use was for the benefit of the people actually working on the code, not on casual users looking for answers.

A popular commercial solution is Jira, which is written in Java, using many of the industry-standard Java components. It's a lot easier for me to use. They also were running a special pricing deal, although I don't know if they still are. Plus, IIRC, they'll make it available for free to recognized open-source development teams. Since they use a lot of open-source components, that's their way of paying back. Some other pluses: I'm pretty sure they have it available bundled with a Tomcat server to make it almost "plug and play", and there are some interesting add-ons for it. Plus, it allows for a fair degree of customization.

A very good open-source solution that's a lot like Jira is Trac. Trac is written in Python, and can be a little tricky to install, but I think there's supposed to be a VM appliance that can get around a lot of that. At any rate, I have an "applianceable" VM image. It comes with a wiki as part of the core package. It's easy to customize. Plus, of course, if you can't do what you want in the basic framework, you have full source code. Although I do just fine working with the standard modification options. Trac does have all sorts of plugins for things like project management systems and the like.

Both Jira and Trac have good hooks into Eclipse Mylyn and the svn source code system as well, so you can do things like check in source code and enter an event into the incident log.

[Ulf Dittmer]

I've heard good things about http://scarab.tigris.org/, although I have no first-hand knowledge of it.

[Tim Holloway]

Tigris is a good source for software, although Scarab looks like it's still pretty young.

Of course the big question was: "Do they eat their own dog food?"

http://www.solitone.org/scarab/issues/

The most objectionable thing to me was that there wasn't as much "up front" info on the home page. But their feature descriptions seem to address most of the most important issues for a source code control system. And, unlike Trac, Scarab is Java-based.

[David Newton]

I'm a long-time JIRA user. It has customizable forms that can be used to ease issue/bug entry, which for me has been very handy as I introduce it to organizations.

[Mike London]

Thanks!

It looks expensive, however.

[Tim Holloway]

I haven't checked Jira's prices in a while, but I thought they had some pretty good deals, at least on Jira itself. And remember, this is a product that works better the more people are collaborating through it, so the price/person is really what counts. Compare it to what it would cost if all those people were tossing sticky notes and emails around, instead.

However, I have done a fair amount of customizing in Trac, too. You can add extra database fields, put extra items on the forms, add extra steps to the workflow (I added a Q/A step or 2 for mine), all with little or no programming. Which, considering it's in Python, is fine with me.

Just as a standard of comparsion, I think I saw signs that Trac is being used extensively in sourceforge.net. Many of the Java open-source project realms, including apache/jakarta and codehaus use Jira - I'm sure they don't mind that it's free for them, but Jira is a good product to work with.

[David Newton]

One place I worked at used Trac before switching to JIRA (they were a non-profit--it was free for them too ;) and we had a reasonably good time with it. Our biggest Trac issue was that some admin stuff required command-line work and a restart; no problem for we-that-installed-it, but a non-starter for non-technical types, which meant we did all the admin work.

[Peter Johnson]

I have used Mantis for some projects. It was fairly reasonable to set up and use.

[Mike London]

thanks!

Good info all.