As the Black Knight rode toward the horizon, he pondered the lasting effects his massacre upon the people will be.
Defect: Sentence is Complete Crap and lacks originality.
Enhancement: Learning to write without sadism.
Enhancement: Change ‘Black Knight’ to something that doesn’t suck.
Reason to Use Bug Tracking
Usually I just use this blog (spelled quickly is golb surpisingly), but I can’t close a bug using wordpress. It is also very hard to track down and find posts where I discuss features and problems. Not so much as difficult to find, but difficult to manage what features I’ve already completed and still need to do.
The natural next step would be to find, install and use a bug tracker.
Bug Trackers are a tool to better manage the project and it helps even if you only have one developer. It is impossible to keep track of every feature you have planned for a project. Once you use a bug tracker, it becomes a must have and very addictive part of planning.
Turning Away From Bug Word Usage
A better description is ‘defect’ which Trac uses. I suppose explaining the term and its history to people is part of the issue. Not everyone takes interest or cares about obscure computer history. The term ‘defect’ matches what the problem is, better than a bug, which crawls around and dies in computer systems.
The question I have is if Bugzilla will deflect and change its name to defectZilla? Perhaps not, it is more of ‘geek’ application. It is unlikely that after the flame war towards anyone that suggests such a thing that it would ever be suggested again.
Mantis avoids the ambiguity all together by omiting the type and just using a number. Mantis resembles a Bugzilla clone, but misses features found in Bugzilla.
Other nice terms:
- Enhancement: A ‘bug’ towards bettering part of the application.
- Task: ‘bug’ that describes a major feature or action towards completing a milestone.
- Feature: Better word for ‘task’ that better describes a new part of the application.
Bugzilla
Fairly easy to install and use, but it is Perl. It is the most popular and ‘best’ bug tracker out there or that is what everyone says. Given the amount of Perl modules, pretty much any feature could be added to Bugzilla to compete with other newcomers. The last news I heard about Bugzilla, they were debating on a feature like the Trac Roadmap.
What I take issue with, is that everything is a bug, no matter if it is an task, suggestion, RFC (Request For Comment), thread, feature, or task. You would think that in this ‘new age’ that they would add a little big more diversity.
Perl is never going to die and I suppose with the proper Apache modules and configuration, it can be as fast as PHP if not more so.
Oh, I rate the design as crap, not that I can design anything better and it is why I don’t use it.
Mantis
Easier to install than Bugzilla, but I honestly didn’t give it much of a try before I finally successfully completed the Trac install. I do remember the hideous ‘My View’ page, but it is a good application.
My only gripe is that for some reason, along with Bugzilla, bug trackers believe they have to have the most complex design layouts. I just want the information that I need where I can easily get to it. Which is why I like the Trac design, it is simple and tells you what you need to know without redundantly going out of your way to do common tasks.
Yeah, I do plan to do something about it, but my task list is full for the next 6 months and if I do something, it would be to clone Trac bug tracking. Perhaps not what the project developers had in mind.
Trac
Dear God,
Why is Trac written in Python? Besides the obvious reasons.
What I would Like to See
I do like the basic project management the bug trackers offer, but I really like subcomponents. Let me give an example for major components and subcomponents.
My Super Cool Project
- Security
- General (Magic Quotes)
- Filtering and Plugins
- Session
- My Page
- Reports
- Form 1
- Administration
- Users
- Pages
- Manage
I would also like to see a graphic presentation of the roadmap in a timeline chart, but that is really difficult.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Game Engine Development and Open Source
- Plans for Base CMS
- Bullet: E-Book Library Management and Content Server
- Using ZendFramework 2 beta1 For Directory Project
- Project Plans
I miss Eventum & Jira in this list. I can’t understand why Trac is hyped so much and bugzilla… The list of severe usability issues is endless.
did you try Bugs Genie? it’s much better than Mantis
We’re working on ‘achilles’, which is is a bugtracking extension for Achievo (http://www.achievo.org). What Achilles does differently than all the others, is integrate completely with project management, planning and time tracking.
Do you know wIT: http://www.waterproof.fr/products/wit/
Self hosted wIT is available here: http://issues.waterproof.fr/
It can handle unlimited issue types (bugs, enhancement, tasks, …) each one can has its own workflow. Workflow are fully customizable and extensible. You can manage components and sub components (unlimited levels). And offer several other powerful features: threaded comments, automatic RoadMap and ChabgeLog management. Links between issues, attachement with automatic thumbnail creation and code highlighting. Strong permission system, per user dashboard and much more…
Build on php5, mysql and eZ components.
@Sebastien
Sounds completely sexy and I’ll have to totally give it a try, if it is free. Um, 30 day trial is nice, but I really want to keep my cost down. I will continue to track the progress of wIT for when I make a little bit more money and need to assess and evaluate a better tracking tool.
We have been having really good luck with a product called Unfuddle (http://unfuddle.com).
We had been using Trac in combination with Basecamp, and really found that Unfuddle was a far superior solution. Unfuddle provides bug and issue tracking, source control using Subversion, basic project management, time tracking, project blog, fine-grained permissions, etc.
The interface is the best we have every seen in a software project management tool.
My team uses BugWiki and we are pretty happy with it. It does the few things we need it to do, and it never forces you to do this, that and the other. A timesaver compared to some of the other systems I have tried over the years. https://www.bugwiki.com
Is it just me or is William C. a BugWiki employee. I have been researching some bug tracking tools recently and everywhere I see, there are some recent comments about how good bugwiki is (twitter, some bug tracker comparisons etc). I look at bugwiki and it’s no better than scribbling down stuff in a spreadsheet. I am not saying it’s bad (everything has it’s uses), but persistent comments stating how great bugwiki is, is pretty darn suspicious. Especially on a post that is a nearly a year old?
I’m guessing you aren’t interested in a Windows only solution, but BugTracker.NET is a free, open source web-based bug tracking app that you might find worth trying.
(Disclaimer: I’m the author)
It’s very simple "out of the box", but also very configurable. Just for starters, you can configure the name of the app, the name of the things it tracks (items? tickets? bugs? defects? issues?), the types of things it tracks. You can not only add custom fields, but you can REMOVE fields too, so you can get it to be very simple, if that’s your style.
More info at http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html