#266639 - 03/10/2005 13:58
Issue Tracking Software
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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We're looking for a bug tracking system at work here. It doesn't have to be free. Any recommendations? I'm looking for things that people have actually got experience of. Is there a comparison review out there anywhere? We'll be looking to evaluate Compuware TrackRecord (which is part of QACenter these days). I'm also pushing Trac. Personally, I liked Bugzilla, which we used at empeg, but it took some customising to get it working the way we wanted, and it didn't have a great selection of reports suitable for project managers. Anything else? Particularly products to avoid looking at...
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-- roger
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#266640 - 03/10/2005 14:39
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Here's what I offered to a recent Bugzilla-vs-Devtrack thread we had here: Quote:
Quote:
As part of the process for selecting our next defect-tracking / change-management system I'd be really grateful for feedback on how DevTrack fits the bill for you, what's missing, what works well and what's horrible.
Can't look at more than one bug's details at once -- either in the dedicated client or the web client ("open in new window" just doesn't work).
Can't get change notifications by email (as far as I can find out). This means bugs don't "come and find you" -- you have to deliberately go and look for them. During project phases where not many bugs come in, this in turn often means that those bugs which do come in don't even get noticed for days on end. An email interface also makes it easier to deal with bugs when not in the office.
Can't see text of all attached notes at once.
Searching was very buggy in the web client (I've only just started using the dedicated client, so can't comment on that).
Rio's particular implementation of Devtrack made attachments to bugs awkward and/or useless. I never figured out how to get them from the web interface, and only once managed to get something from the Citrix server.
The rest of Sigmatel use something called Clearquest, which I haven't tried yet, but I keep getting emails sent to everyone at Sigmatel saying things like "We've added 'beta 5' as a value for the FoundInRelease field, please restart Clearquest" which sounds a bit pathetic to me.
Peter
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#266641 - 03/10/2005 18:25
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/01/2002
Posts: 3937
Loc: Providence, RI
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RT (Request Tracker) yes, Remedy no.
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#266642 - 03/10/2005 19:08
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 13/09/1999
Posts: 2401
Loc: Croatia
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Some acquaintances of mine have recently switched from Bugzilla to Jira. I have no personal experience with it, though.
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Q#5196
MkII #080000376, 18GB green
MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue
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#266643 - 04/10/2005 00:56
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Daria]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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Here's a BIG HUGE "NO" for Remedy. It's still in use at ATI and I had the displeasure of having to use it while working QA. I don't work in QA anymore so I avoid it like the plague.
I've been using Mantis more recently for something completely unrelated and it's decent so far. Though I didn't set it up myself and it's only lightly beeing used right now.
Bugzilla looked like it was going to be far more trouble than it was worth.
Bruno
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#266644 - 04/10/2005 04:03
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: hybrid8]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 12/01/2002
Posts: 2009
Loc: Brisbane, Australia
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Another vote for Mantis here. I looked at Bugzilla but decided it was overly complicated and confusing. It's working well for us. Free and fairly easy to setup I found.
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Christian
#40104192 120Gb (no longer in my E36 M3, won't fit the E46 M3)
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#266645 - 04/10/2005 04:33
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Shonky]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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Quote:
Free and fairly easy to setup I found.
Free's good.
I forgot to mention that we're a Windows shop, although we do have an Apache 2-on-Windows box (which we're using for Subversion).
Oh yeah, integration with Subversion (or easily extensible to integrate with Subversion) would be cool, too. Not essential, though.
_________________________
-- roger
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#266646 - 04/10/2005 04:39
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 12/01/2002
Posts: 2009
Loc: Brisbane, Australia
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Mantis requires Apache, PHP and MySQL. All of which ran fine on our old NT4 server and still run without a hitch on our new Windows 2003 Server machine.
I think there is some basic support for CVS support. If you're looking for subversion support, then trac is probably a goer. I see that the MythTV crerator selected subversion + trac.
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Christian
#40104192 120Gb (no longer in my E36 M3, won't fit the E46 M3)
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#266647 - 04/10/2005 04:39
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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Another no for Remedy, I hated using it. If I was looking for issue tracking I would give FogBugz a go. I have played with their trial and I like the simply approach they take, though I worry that it might become restrictive after a while. http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/index.htmlMy favorite bug tracking system isn't a bug tracking system at all. It is part of the CRM system from Onyx Software http://www.onyx.com/ . I work for Onyx Software on and off, they eat their own dog food so the bug tracking side of their software works the way the development team want it to. It is very odd though when you are using the software with the bug to report the bug (and I did once have the problem of not being able to report a bug, because of the bug itself). There are benefits of having bug tracking as part of you CRM system, as bugs and feature requests can be fed straight into the system by the customers or the customer support team.
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Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday
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#266648 - 04/10/2005 04:55
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: andy]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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Quote:
Another no for Remedy, I hated using it. If I was looking for issue tracking I would give FogBugz a go.
We're using an older version of FogBugz for support incidents, and we're not liking it that much -- it doesn't have a great deal of flexibility, and the project managment reporting sucks. I don't know if the new version is better or not.
_________________________
-- roger
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#266649 - 04/10/2005 11:23
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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I don't want to hijack the thread, but this question is closely related anyway.
What source management systems do you guys recommend? We've taken a brief look at CVS and read notes about others like Subversion. I know either can be used for small projects as well as larger ones (for example, Apple uses CVS as far as I know). At ATI they use Perforce.
A partner and I are trying to decide one something for our own project. Cost is a sensitive point. Perforce is "free" for two accounts. If you need more, it's US$800 per account, including the first two (ie. $2400 for 3 seats). So far it looks a lot easier to set up than the others as well as more robust (I can't remember exactly, but we thought something fairly obvious/important was missing from some of the others we were researching).
Ideally we want something we can install, make some minor configuration changes on and deploy. We don't want to have to re-write the software for our own use (we have our own project to worry about).
Bruno
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#266650 - 04/10/2005 11:40
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Shonky]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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Trac hasn't been updated in almost a year and their roadmap looks extremely sketchy. It promises to do quite a lot, but I haven't been overly impressed with the implementation I've seen on the AdiumX site (Mac-based swiss-army instant messenger).
Bruno
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#266651 - 04/10/2005 12:04
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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veteran
Registered: 25/04/2000
Posts: 1525
Loc: Arizona
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We use ClearQuest at work. Mainly because it integrates so well with ClearCase, but it is extremely simple to use once you get accustomed to it. No clue on the price, but I'd be willing to bet that it is pretty hefty.
- Tim
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#266652 - 04/10/2005 12:27
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: hybrid8]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/01/2002
Posts: 3937
Loc: Providence, RI
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CVS sucks the a**. OpenAFS is going to move to SVN soon.
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#266653 - 04/10/2005 12:47
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: hybrid8]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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I administered a Perforce installation once. It seemed to me that it required an awful lot of administrator intervention. I suppose that my users might have been idiots (though I doubt it), but it seems like I was correcting some locking problem three times a week. And there were only about half a dozen users.
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Bitt Faulk
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#266654 - 04/10/2005 14:18
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: hybrid8]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Quote:
What source management systems do you guys recommend? We've taken a brief look at CVS and read notes about others like Subversion. I know either can be used for small projects as well as larger ones (for example, Apple uses CVS as far as I know). At ATI they use Perforce.
We currently use CVS but are likely to switch to Subversion at some point. At ~60,000 files in the principal module, we've about hit CVS's scalability limits -- tagging takes half an hour, and locks out every other user for the whole period. Subversion's whole-repository-version and atomic changeset stuff would be nice to have, too.
Peter
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#266655 - 04/10/2005 16:23
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Daria]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 31/08/1999
Posts: 1649
Loc: San Carlos, CA
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Quote:
CVS sucks the a**.
I'll second that. CVS has been pissing me off for 6 years now and I think subversion is ready to replace it. I'll be moving my company in the next month or so.
-Mike
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#266656 - 04/10/2005 19:43
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: andy]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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FogBugz is looking pretty damned good from this side right now. Decent price too. Now I just have to make sure I can eliminate our requirement for Perforce. I'm trying deperately to lower the seat cost per developer as my partner and I have to pay for everything ourselves (obviously) with no revenue coming in from this development for quite some time. Other outside-of-salary costs are high enough (some level of insurance, employer tax contributions, unemployment payments, pension, etc..)
Bruno
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#266657 - 04/10/2005 19:55
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: mcomb]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Interesting timing. My team at work just (as of yesterday) moved to Subversion. The main thing keeping us from doing it earlier was external collaborators who were used to cvs, but that's been taken care of.
Being newer than cvs, svn doesn't have quite the number of friendly GUI clients, editor integration, etc. but it's getting there. Since XCode can use it, and there are a couple good OS X GUIs for it, I'm happy so far.
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#266658 - 04/10/2005 20:21
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: tonyc]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 12/01/2002
Posts: 2009
Loc: Brisbane, Australia
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For those using CVS or SVN looking for a decent client, I can recommend the Tortoise clients (i.e. TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN) in conjunction with WinMerge. Although they mightn't have all the features as something like WinCVS the do the job just fine for us and are very easy to use with integrated shell menus for all commands. At least with clients you can try them out but keep using your standard client at the same time. Looks like I might investigate SVN as long is it can import CVS with full histories etc. However CVS does seem to be working OK for us - our repository is only about 2500 files currently and we only have about 4 developers actively using it.
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Christian
#40104192 120Gb (no longer in my E36 M3, won't fit the E46 M3)
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#266659 - 04/10/2005 20:36
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Shonky]
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veteran
Registered: 19/06/2000
Posts: 1495
Loc: US: CA
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We use TortoiseCVS here at work. It works for the simple tasks, but it can also be annoying. 
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Donato MkII/080000565 MkIIa/010101253 ricin.us
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#266660 - 04/10/2005 20:43
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 14/01/2002
Posts: 2858
Loc: Atlanta, GA
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Heh, I wrote (more like "banged out") a bug tracking system for one of my teams about three weeks before I left (due to a promotion). This was about two years ago. When I left the company two months ago I went and visited the team to say goodbye and they are still using it and it is now firmly ingrained in their processes. In fact, the team leader says they couldn't live without it. My legacy will live on. Let's hear it for software that lives much longer than intended!
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.
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#266661 - 05/10/2005 03:47
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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enthusiast
Registered: 20/11/2000
Posts: 279
Loc: Pacific Northwest
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I would say no to Remedy as well--icky! It has been >4 years, but Onyx was less than impressive, back then. I hear good things about TRAC...
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#266663 - 05/10/2005 05:40
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: hybrid8]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 21/05/1999
Posts: 5335
Loc: Cambridge UK
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Quote:
What source management systems do you guys recommend?
Subversion is working well for me. Performance is much better than CVS, especially for tagging and branching which are effectively instantaneous irrespective of the size of the repo. Checkins are atomic which makes maintenance more sane. You can trade off between performance and robustness with a choice of backends - although I'm using the allegedly less robust BerkeleyDB backend and haven't had any problem so far. Performance is great, at least for the moderate sized repo we have currently (we have multiple GNU toolchains under source control so it's not insubstantial). Access methods are flexible, with built in ssh tunneling if needed, and even a web front end (which I haven't used yet). For Windows users, TortoiseSVN is a brilliant front end (shell namespace extension).
We're now standardising on Subversion across the company (through aquisitions we have about four different systems in use today).
Rob
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#266664 - 05/10/2005 06:08
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: rob]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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Quote:
You can trade off between performance and robustness with a choice of backends - although I'm using the allegedly less robust BerkeleyDB backend and haven't had any problem so far.
We opted for the FSFS backend -- we're on Windows, and I didn't want to worry about BDB versions.
We do a hot snapshot of the repositories every night (we have 3), and they're backed up with everything else.
Quote:
Access methods are flexible, with built in ssh tunneling if needed, and even a web front end (which I haven't used yet).
We've got ours hosted on Apache2, and we allow external HTTPS access as well. This is useful for when people are working from home (like me, now, for instance), and for the guys in our Indian office.
The built-in WebDAV interface allows you to access the repository directly from Word, e.g. We've turned on auto-versioning so that our documentation people don't have to worry about it.
WebSVN is a very nice web-based interface.
Quote:
For Windows users, TortoiseSVN is a brilliant front end (shell namespace extension).
I'll second that -- if you've only just started using it, check out the options available when you right-drag a version-controlled resource somewhere else.
We're also using SubverRRSed (from an hourly cron job, rather than a commit hook), which generates an RSS feed showing what's been checked in, and by who.
_________________________
-- roger
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#266665 - 06/10/2005 03:35
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: peter]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/02/2002
Posts: 3212
Loc: Portland, OR
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Quote:
Subversion's whole-repository-version and atomic changeset stuff would be nice to have, too.
This is a big part of what's keeping me from switching our department. Per-file tagging is the bomb. On the other hand, CVS still sucks -- pretty much all the work I've been doing lately has been writing scripts to help manage our code distribution. CVS makes it easy in some ways, and painful in others. 
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#266666 - 09/10/2005 20:45
Re: Issue Tracking Software
[Re: Roger]
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 08/02/2002
Posts: 3411
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Remedy sucks. I hate it with a vengence. PVCS Tracker used to suck in '99. No idea if it improved. I like Jira
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Mk2a 60GB Blue. Serial 030102962
sig.mp3: File Format not Valid.
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