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Poll: What do you use to track your bugs?

49 points| toast76 | 15 years ago | reply

What tools do fellow hackers use to track their bugs, issues, features and client/user feedback. Do you like it or hate it? If you don't use one, why not?

EDIT: As some of you may know, we're building a bug tracking tool of sorts (actually something a lot different to all the tools listed). The point of this poll is to find out what folks like us are currently using. Your input would be greatly appreciated!

74 comments

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[+] Confusion|15 years ago|reply
We use Jira, but it is much more than a bug tracker. With Greenhopper, it offers us complete issue management, which includes iteration planning in stories and tasks. With FishEye it integrates a view on our subversion repositories into that, allowing crosslinks and beating the pants off of any other solution.

We switched to Jira after getting annoyed at Mantis once too often. We all had experience with Bugzilla, which is like using bow and arrow in these days of guns. We investigated for a bit, looked at Trac and FogBugz amongst others, but decided in favor of Jira, primarily because of Greenhopper. Issue management without decent planning abilities is like a blunt knife: usable, but unnecessarily hard. Haven't regretted it one single bit.

[+] bbuffone|15 years ago|reply
We started using JIRA this year after using unfuddle and pivotal tracker. The ability to have issue and story tracking in one place has been great. Greenhopper is really nice, since we now have much more visibility across the teams; testing, product, ops, engineering.

It does take time to get setup to fit your organization but it has been worth it.

[+] iamclovin|15 years ago|reply
We use GitHub Issues. It's very barebones but ties in very nicely with our source control site of choice: GitHub, and there is no need to context-switch.
[+] masonmark|15 years ago|reply
YouTRACK--a keyboard-friendly fast fast FAST bug tracker from JetBrains (of IntelliJ fame).

http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack

After I gave up the concept of tracking bugs and doing feature planning in the same app (sounds great but has never worked in practice), this tracker became my default for any projects where I have a say in the matter.

We moved from JIRA because administering a JIRA installation is practically a full-time job. Have also used Fogbugz, Redmine, Mantis, Bugzilla over the years, so that list is my main basis for comparison. I hate YouTRACK less than those.

Edit: I see they are now offering a free hosted version for the first half of 2011.

[+] jesstaa|15 years ago|reply
Post-It notes and 'drop everything and fix it now.' If it's not important enough to fix now, then it's alright if we forget it.
[+] vyrotek|15 years ago|reply
I like the Post-It note strategy.

Especially when all the notes are on a public window/wall. This way everyone can see the 'queue' of stuff and is a good reminder to re-prioritize constantly.

[+] pufuwozu|15 years ago|reply
I work for Atlassian so I'm biased ;)

Good to see another Australian company taking on the software development market. Especially good to see that the company is partially funded by the Atlassian founders!

[+] mmilo|15 years ago|reply
someone's done their homework :)

Not so sure if we fall into the software dev category so much as the web dev category as we're really only supporting tracking on websites and web apps.

[+] nyellin|15 years ago|reply
For those of you who don't know, the OP founded http://bugherd.com/

toast76, can you explain what makes BugHerd unique?

[+] toast76|15 years ago|reply
Awesome leading question, thanks!

BugHerd is a tracker for web developers and designers run within the website you're working on. Part feedback tool, part bug tracker, part QA tool. It's a bug tracker that engineers, designers, clients and stakeholders can all use. Each group has a different interface meaning no one is ever in over their head. A lot of the stuff you normally have to enter manually is logged/tracked automagically, meaning more often than not a short description is enough to get all the detail you need to reproduce a problem.

[+] __david__|15 years ago|reply
So I've been using "ditz" on a few projects and I quite like it. It's about the most minimal bug tracker you can get, but I like that the bugs get checked into your scm, right along with the code. I also like that I don't need to launch a browser to add or edit bugs. It fits in beautifully with distributed VCSes like darcs or git.
[+] warp|15 years ago|reply
For musicbrainz.org we're using jira. I'm not particularly happy about that, mostly because jira is not open source/free software (and musicbrainz is). Otherwise no complaints, jira does everything we need it to do, and apart from some interaction design issues does it quite well.
[+] mmoulton|15 years ago|reply
We primarily use the GreenHopper plugin to interact with JIRA. This allows us to both track new development and defects in an agile friendly way, without the need to maintain all the index cards.
[+] yan|15 years ago|reply
I use GitHub's issue tracker
[+] mindcrime|15 years ago|reply
Bugzilla. I wouldn't say I love or hate it, but it works and it's what I know. The biggest downside is that I'm not a Perl hacker, so if I wanted to hack on BZ, I'd have to take the time to learn Perl. Luckily I've never felt much of a need to modify Bugzilla. It just works.
[+] diziet|15 years ago|reply
"Stop doing everything and fix it" along with basecamp to-do lists for the other, non critical bugs.
[+] syaz1|15 years ago|reply
Basecamp is awesome if a lot of people involved are non-technical. They tend to get dizzy looking at Jira/Trac.
[+] nico_h|15 years ago|reply
I use Taskpaper as a task/bug tracking file. Plain text file with GTD token support and line filtering.

Clicking at the beginning of '-' prefixed line will add @done(2011-02-22) and appear as stricken through, and even hidden or moved to the end of the file. I have one per project, and they are tracked with git. Searching for "not @done and not @cancelled" will only leave the tasks remaining to be done.

http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper

I use an extended DarkMatterPlus* theme file from http://groups.google.com/group/taskpaper/files

* : @fix appear in bright orange, @cancelled behaves the same as @done etc...

[+] haberman|15 years ago|reply
Google Code -- I'm surprised it's not listed. I recently had to decide between GitHub's issue tracker (I'm already using GitHub for source code hosting) and Google Code, and almost everyone I could find that had an opinion said Google Code was much better.
[+] adrianoconnor|15 years ago|reply
I use http://www.codespaces.com, but I'm biased because I know the guy that founded and still runs it. It was the first app I saw that was fully written in Ext-js (this was pre 1.0) and back in 2007 or whenever it was that he wrote it it blew me away. It does all kinds of neat things, but mostly it's good because it's accessible to non-technical people -- lots of classic interface paradigms.

I also voted for Trac, because that's my go-to bug tracker for corporate projects that get checked in to a private SVN server.

[+] Loic|15 years ago|reply
We use Indefero http://www.indefero.net It is both offered as free software (GPL) and you have hosting options. A bit like WordPress.
[+] andybak|15 years ago|reply
You should add an option to differntiate 'some other tracker' from 'a tracker I wrote myself'. I'd be interested to see how many hand-rolled solutions there are out there.