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Poll: What bug tracking software do you use?
44 points by ErrantX on Oct 25, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 72 comments
As requested by tmpk: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901314

"Which of the following do you use in your job/start-up: Also, if you could provide the rough number of users that use your particular bug tracking system installation that would be helpful."

(I added a few extra of my own too)

Trac
121 points
Jira
70 points
FogBugz
65 points
Other (please provide name)
60 points
Bugzilla
49 points
Redmine
42 points
Github
38 points
Mantis
31 points
Pivotal Tracker
23 points
Bitbucket
10 points
Google Code
9 points
Assembla
4 points
BugTracker.NET
2 points


I'm a little biased since it's my startup, but we use Zen (http://agilezen.com/). We only have a team of two, but some of our customers have sizable teams using it.


I love your app; I signed up for a Free account today and will definitely be upgrading to a paid subscription when there is more than one dude working at my startup.


lighthouse ( http://www.lighthouseapp.com )


we're in the same boat! too bad they raised the price from 10 to 15/month. cash flow is difficult as is :(


I apologize for being...Microsofty...but I use (and am the author of) BugTracker.NET. It's a free and open source bug tracking app for ASP.NET. In style and philosophy, it's closest to FogBugz.

This weekend I just finished getting the git and mercurial integration working. My eyes hurt.

More info about BugTracker.NET at http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html.


I added it in the list too :)

It's always interesting to see the writers of these tools "in person"! Thanks for posting.


I have built my own. It took about 4 hours to build a workable first draft with all those free Rails plugins available. Now I customize it bit by bit whenever there is a need.


I use Target Process for managing the entire development process. We're using Scrum as our process, and surfacing bugs within the same tool is a no-brainer. I like that I can identify bugs from changes (product backlog) effectively, and that I can take a bug and convert it to a user story if the scope of the bug justifies it.

It also comes with a helpdesk that allows features and suggestions be fed in.

In my opinion, whatever is handling your development process would ideally handle your bugs too. If the bugs aren't up there and visible as something you need to do before anything else then you don't have control of the quality of your products.

http://www.targetprocess.com/

Requires .Net, ISS, etc.

We have: Users: 7 Feature requestors: 8 Product owner: 1 Bug reportees: Thousands (anyone from any of the clients where our software is implemented).

Used in the past: Trac, Request Tracker ( http://bestpractical.com/rt/ ), FogBugz.


I'm surprised at how popular FogBugz is. Anyone here used it before/after using Trac, Redmine, BZ, or Mantis? How does it compare?


Used Trac before FogBugz.

I like Trac better. It has a more intuitive interface, and with the various plugins you can argue it does way more.


So why did you switch to FogBugz?


If I had to guess I would assume that a manager/rest of team set the bug tracking software system prior to his arrival.


If Trac has a mass-add option like Fogbugz does, it sure wasn't obvious. Entering 50+ bug reports with Trac, like most other bug tracking software, is a pain.


Sifter: http://sifterapp.com/


Notable that in his year of public (blog) development, many of Sifter's visual techniques had widespread pickup in other SaaS tools. I hope he keeps innovating his design language.


sifter is amazing and it has one of the best blogs I have read.


At my current job we use FogBugz and it's nice. I don't really see anything too special about it. I only use the basic features, but other people seem to get really into it and some of the features it provides (such as the email integration).

I've previously used Unfuddle and found it easy and intuitive. I liked it a lot. I've also met the two guys who started it a couple times. They are based in Honolulu, it is in Ruby/Rails, and they host at Rackspace. They seem to be doing very well.

I've looked, but never used a few of the others like Github, Bitbucket, google code, and Trac.


I use FogBugz for customer support and Fossil (http://www.fossil-scm.org) for actually tracking bugs. Users: 1.


DevTrack, with somewhere on the order of 100 users. I really have no idea how well it would work in a small startup environment.

I'm not crazy about it, but I've never met an issue tracking system I am crazy about. DevTrack can be configured pretty well to suit our workflow, but I still run up against inscrutable problems sometimes. This may be due in part to the configuration, but it says something that we're still having problems with that.


What's the bug tracking like in GitHub? Considering using it for source control - and if it's fully integrated with bug tracking that would be a real bonus.


With new plugins for MantisBT 1.2, there is well-integrated support for Subversion (WebSVN or SourceForge), Git (Gitweb or Github), and potentially any other source control system once a simple plugin is written for it.

See: http://leetcode.net/blog/2009/01/integrating-git-svn-with-ma...


Started using it recently. I'm finding that it's very limiting. It has very few features. For instance: no fixed/duplicate/wontfix/etc resolve status. Just "closed".


It's pretty simple/minimalistic. Here's their summary...

    * Deal with your issues just like you deal with email (fast, JavaScript interface)
    * Create and apply labels to issues to assign to users or categorize
    * Drag and drop issues to prioritize them
    * Vote on issues that you want to see tackled
    * Search, sort, and filter
    * Close issues from commit messages
    * Keyboard shortcuts
...from their blog post about it: http://github.com/blog/411-github-issue-tracker . It's also got a screencast there. If you'd like to see what it looks like from a user's perspective, here's the issue tracker for the issue tracker: http://github.com/defunkt/github-issues/issues :P


Looks like they have a lot of open issues on the issue tracker ;)


Pivotal Tracker


PT shines where most other options fail. I don't want to organize my priorities by setting fields in some dreary form, I just want to drag&drop. (If only it had sub-stories.)


Re. sub-stories, have you checked out the "tasks" feature, which is disabled by default?

http://pivotallabs.com/users/dan/blog/articles/965-story-tas...


Yay! thanks a lot!


It also has the added benefit of letting you see (and prioritize) bugs and features in the same place.


I added it as an option; seeing as it seems popular.


Same here. 4-5 people, at most 3 / project.


At work, we use TeamTrack - I wouldn't recommend it, it has a pretty horrible interface.

Previously I used FogBugz, which was a joy to use, how I miss it now!


We use our own tracker at http://www.timmyontime.com . Actually, this is not a bug tracking app but a project monitoring one. We have a concept of "notes" and they can be anything you want : bugs, todos, ideas, etc. With that app, a bug becomes a task and you can do time-tracking on that task or comment on it.


I use retrospectiva: http://retrospectiva.org/overview. It's a trac-like written in Ruby on Rails, but with multi-projects and git support. And I personnaly find that retrospectiva looks nicer than trac. The AgilePM extension is a also a great plus for us.

EDIT: We are a team of 8 people using it, 2-4 per project.


I've been using Unfuddle for all of my projects for a few years. We have a few projects and around 10 users. Works wonders.


We love Unfuddle! Not too complicated, no too simple. Pleasantly integrated.


Same. Please add unfuddle to the options. A lot of people use it.


Jira, with about 500 developers. It is quite slow with this many developers. Apparently Atlassian has developed their own database query engine, and use the database only as simple storage. This makes it very hard to optimize for our internal developers. (Note: I know very little about the details - just that it is slow)


Been using Trac for a while, then we switched to Redmine (mainly because we're a Rails shop). Both are ok.

I was eyeing youtrack the other day (http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/index.html), looks pretty nice, and at 150$ for 20 users it's pretty cheap.


I use Bugzilla at a place that was setup before I got involved. Too much noise for what we need, but too much legacy to change.

Currently trying Lighthouse for a small 2 person project.

I'm actually thinking that Google Wave could be interesting here. We've all got accounts and I'm thinking of giving it a go just to see what happens.


We used the tracker in GForge AS. We used it on two sub-projects, one with 2 developers and a manager and one with around 8 members of varying technical expertise.

The problem I have is how do you your tracker data out at the end of the project, for archival or moving to another tracker?

Do any trackers provide a simple export to XML?


Well..

I use BitBucket. It's not the best per-se but as I almost exclusively use Mercurial and host on Bit Bucket it makes sense.

I am not sure I would recommend it for serious projects; the hosting is stellar (and hg rocks as SCM :D) but if you have the time to integrate with Lighthouse or other such apps it's probably worth it.


I'd love to get some suggestions on what you think would make it a better tracker!


Wicked! Well....

Some sort of "roadmap" feature. The ability to manually mark a revision as being relevant to the ticket (like the auto feature you have). When a revision (or revisions) are related to a ticket display a prominent, separate, link(s) to them in the ticket. Due date and importance for tickets. Highlight the importance in the list view (e.g. urgent = red etc.). When a revision is "tagged" in the mercurial repository create a link to a "changelog" that lists fixed issues for that tag name (if it exists: version or milestone - or even a separate tagging system).

That's just a few off the top of my head. (sorry; I always seem to be dissing you guys :( not intentional)


Duly noted, thanks. :)


We use FogBugz with about 60 users. Its been interesting seeing its growth over the years. The recent Fogbugz 7 release seems to be one of the most significant though with the addition of plugin support enabling a lot more customization.


Previously it was called Telelogic Change. Now it's called IBM Rational Change or something like that. Users in the thousands. For personal projects I use whatever the hosting service provides me (GitHub, BitBucket, SourceForge, etc).


FogBugz, with under a dozen users.

I find it a bit frustrating (missing features; Unix compatibility issues), but the user interface was easier for our non-technical staff to learn than was the interface for RT, which was our initial choice.


We wrote our own issue tracker using our platform. Dogfood tastes good.

https://www.labkey.org/issues/home/Developer/issues/list.vie...


I wrote my own at work, and it turned into a bigger project that integrated a lot of department workflow (parts, maintenance scheduling, metrics, etc.).

If I had known then what I know now, I would not have gotten involved.


The Hit List (mac app, single developer so I haven't needed fancy things yet. Actually I did have my testers use Lighthouse for a while, but that was too cumbersome for me.)


I can't believe noone mentioned codebase (http://www.codebasehq.com). We use it and it's great!


At my current job we have Redmine setup, I throw all my personal stuff up on BitBucket, and two previous startups I worked at used Jira and FogBugz,


http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-agile-project-managem...

users: 20


At work we use Microsoft Team Foundation Server...


Same here, using TFS at work. I don't have a problem with it at all, but that could be from my lack of exposure to other products.


We use Drupal project_issue for all of our projects (including Webmin). It's not perfect, but it serves our needs pretty well.


2 users on Pivotal Tracker. Considering moving to something custom-built and specific to web development. Any recommendations?


We use RT http://bestpractical.com/rt/ have about 60 internal users.


Jira

Internally - 10, bespoke project stakeholders - up to 100 at a time, community developers - 100s (we've open sourced our core framework).


I use lighthouse ( http://www.lighthouseapp.com ). We are in 6.


I use FogBugz at Justin.tv. It's well made.


Using http://xp-dev.com (eating own dog food)


GForge - http://gforge.org/gf/


http://flyspray.org/


Ditto. Pretty simple to install and configure. Looks decent, and works for me. Has some minor issues, and could use more integration with other tools. But only took a few minutes to set up on my LAMP server.


wes kind of ran down using Bugzilla; too much email noise. Now we keep a text file, review occasionally. Works for 12-person company, 6 developers.


Test Track Pro


Google Code


Lighthouse


Rally


Trac. And it's not just a bug tracking. It's a great collaboration tool, especially with tags, blog and discussion plugins installed.




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