[Tech] Software Issue Management

Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
So, a little different from our usual topics, but I know a number of us are also software developers so worth a thought...

I'm looking at getting a piece of issue management software to help track feature requests and bugs for software I write. Currently I get all this over email or scribbled in my large notepad when I meet with my customers. It's not exactly robust... but it kinda works for now. Still, complexity will only rise so I figure I may as well start look at this now.

Here's my requirements:

  • Web-based, accessed using a web browser, requires no plugins
  • Customer-friendly (assume smart but not particularly tech-savvy)
  • Non-hosted solution, likely based on PHP, mySQL (assume LAMP, maybe Perl or Python)
  • Free or nearly free (top price ~£100 all in, in perpetuity)
  • Fairly flexible/customisable (i.e. new statuses, a bit on styles)
  • Emailed updates on new/edit/closed issues
  • Maintained software

I think that's about it, aside from the meta-requirement of not having a web site full of bullshit (if the website tries to talk about their value proposition, I'm really not interested).

To date, I've dug up three possibilities, but I've never used any of them.


Any thoughts? Any other suggestions?
 
Iron_fist

Iron_fist

Super Moderator
Staff member
we have written something for this at work that we built several of our projects on. you can find it at

http://elastik.sourceforge.net/

not sure if the SVN mod is upstream yet, but it does tickets, is fully configurable and looks reasonably nice by default :)

James is working on some more modules for it at the moment and i have a couple in mind when i get round to it

but yeah fee free to take a look and as i said we're still developing and working out a few kinks, so expect fairly frequent updates, though that said it's nice and stable so you'll only have to update if new features take your fancy, or if there is a security issue
 
Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
For me, decoupling from source control (not that I'm using any source control just now :p ) is potentially beneficial so I can use the tool as a mixture of a requirements management and bug reporting/tracking tool without confusing words like "check in" or "branch" or whatever. As the sole developer, I don't have much in the way of communication confusion... ;)

I'll give Elastik a try before wandering off into anything else, actually. Looks straight forward and configurable and seems to hit my requirements square in the face so we're off to a good start.

Thanks Iron!

(Still happy for other suggestions, by the by.)
 
E

elDiablo

Guest
I've used Mantis in the past and quite like it. No idea if it's better or worse than others though.
 
thatbloke

thatbloke

Junior Administrator
I have used Bugzilla at work for 4 years, and as a user of it I find it easy to use. I should probably state that I've never used any other bug tracking system, however.

You can perform searches through your issues that can be as simple or as complex as you like - it will then display you a list of the matched items, (and though I have never made use of the option myself) there is an XML export option if you wanted to take that data and make it look prettier.

Now I'll admit I don't admin our bugzilla system myself - however, you set up a bunch of "products" (as many as you like) for each item you want to be able to create bugs for. You can then categorise these products further, for instance two of our categories are "Software Applications" and "Utils/Misc". This is the first thing you are asked for when creating a bug report.

Each product can then have a number of components, so it's easy to split your application(s) into sub-components, which you can provide your own searches/reports on.

You can then set up a bunch of versions for the software to raise the bug against, what we do here is when an issue is found the issue is raised against the version of software the issue is found in, we then have a "Milestone" field which is the intended (future) version of the software that we'll have the fix for said issue in.

This Milestone field is the main way we use to keep track of things - what's in development, what was completed in what release, etc. etc.

There are various other fields that are of use, some of which we don't use, some of which we do, and some of which are custom ones that we've added ourself (no idea how easy/difficult this is to do).

Bugs have all the usual set of statuses and sub-statuses that we also find very useful. You can also assign priorities.

On top of bugzilla we also have a separate web application (that we call the dashboard) that shows us at a glance the currently open (i.e bugs that are not CLOSED, but are in any of NEW/ASSIGNED/FIXED/VERIFIED states) bugs for each product, with a separate page for each. This is created with some php that's done in-house, I have no idea how easy/hard this is to integrate with our bugzilla system though.


...Hopefully that's useful to you, if you have more questions then go ahead and ask :)
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
Ronin Storm said:
  • Web-based
  • Customer-friendly
Click to expand...

Oxymoron. Sorry.

We use Mantis at work. Fairly configurable too for custom fields as you need them. We use it for our main request and bug tracking as well as for our internal repairs tracking system.

Really simple to setup, open source, still being developed, so works fine for what we need.
 
Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
For the moment, I'm going with Elastik. It has enough depth that I can get into the main purpose of recording reports (bugs/requests/whatever) fairly quickly and with a customisable workflow but is still simple enough that I can tweak the interface code directly without needing to dig through years/reams of documentation.

Once it's had some live fire practice, I'll report on how well I think it stands up to my purpose.

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions!
 
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