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Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?
- lukeck 13y agoJira.
- Yhippa 13y agoSurprised its not on there. FWIW here's a list of major issue trackers from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_sy....
- polynomial 13y agoAny guesses as to how Jira got left off? In my exp it's one of the most popular issue trackers & integrates with other PM tools.
- gnosis 13y agoI'll tell you exactly how it got left off. I've just never heard of it. Do most HN readers have the impression that polls like this are made by some some all-knowing, perfectly fair, professional editor who only puts up well researched, carefully thought out, scientific and objective options in their polls? It might surprise you, but I'm just another HN reader just like yourself. I woke up today and thought, "Hey, I'd like to know what other HN readers consider good bugtrackers. Why don't I put up a poll?" I remembered the names of a few of bugtrackers off the top of my head, but just having a few would make for a pretty lame poll. So I pulled up the wikipedia article on the comparison of bug trackers. It had a million listed, so I thought that might make for too long a poll. So I chose the ones I personally heard of, and added an "Other" category for the rest. I hope that clears up some of the mystery.
- harshadura 13y agoits quite funny to see you know about bitbucket and never heard about jira before. ;-)
- yajoe 13y agoThat's fair, and you're right this is a community forum where we learn from each other. For example, just yesterday I learned about akka for the first time even though I've been writing event-driven Java and searching google for it (or something like it) for years. One reason why I found JIRA's omission so surprising is it's widely used by companies that have different departments or roles. It typically becomes the default choice when a company gets large enough to have a PM. Github doesn't scale with roles (yet). JIRA is so common, I'm curious what part of our industry you hang out in to know what growth Atlassian still has :) You probably use tools everyday that I'm also unfamiliar with -- we simply have different experiences. Disclaimer: Atlassian is about to go public... so I've been doing my research on whether to buy.
- JoshTriplett 13y agoMakes me wonder how some polls would turn out if options had both upvote and downvote buttons. I have used every bug tracker in this poll, as well as a few more (redmine, Assembla, GNATS, OTRS, Roundup, ikiwiki, various custom internal tools), and Jira was by far the second worst (behind one of the custom one-offs).
- Confusion 13y agoI'm surprised. Our company evaluated several bugtrackers and jira was by far the best. We're still using it two years later and still quite happy with it.
- JoshTriplett 13y agoJira seems like the kind of system sold to managers and then inflicted on engineers. Managers love it because, like Excel, it's the kind of tool that lets you easily generate reports and enforce workflows without programming. (And in fairness, that can be a major selling point.) However, from an engineering perspective, it makes simple tasks clunky; it turns what should be 1-2 step processes into 5-step processes, and otherwise manages to be the antithesis of a lightweight tracking tool. The phrase "makes the difficult things easy and the easy things difficult" (or "painful") comes to mind. In particular, the tasks it makes difficult/painful are the ones that engineers find themselves doing 30 times a day. And for agile/scrum, Greenhopper is absurdly bad, for the same reason.
- Confusion 13y agoBeing one of the engineers actually using it on a daily basis, all I can say is: I don't know why you have the impression that that is the way you need to use the product in practice, but that certainly doesn't match our experience. We hardly use the workflow and reporting components and you really don't need to, to make good use of it. And we're quite happy with Greenhopper as well. It's far from perfect, but Greenhopper is useful to us, where all other project planner / issue tracker crossovers were found to be borderline useless for our use cases.
- 13y ago
- smaili 13y agoWas thinking the same exact thing except if you look at the ones listed, it looks like this is a list of free trackers. Maybe the OP should've added that important tidbit in the title.
- esalman 13y agoTrello
- pagekicker 13y agoredmine
- jbrooksuk 13y agoBugify
- andersonmat 13y agoThis is probably my favorite self-hosted solution.
- tedsuo 13y agoPivotal Tracker
- jonnyrockit 13y agomonsterboards (http://getmonsterboards.com http://getmonsterboards.com)
- HarveyKandola 13y agoGemini (http://countersoft.com http://countersoft.com)
- milliams 13y agoThe Bug Genie http://www.thebuggenie.com/ http://www.thebuggenie.com/
- michaelbuddy 13y agoYup. I like this one. Easy to self host. Wiki is a great bonus. I need to figure out how to get emails to sync with cron or however that works.
- wting 13y agoI'm surprised GitHub is by far #1. I wonder if it's familiarity rather than preference. Github's minimal approach of using labels for everything is like Gmail's tags over folders. I wish GitHub had a "This bug affects me" or +1 button so the comment history stays clean of "me too" responses.
- erikb 13y agoI also feel such a questionaire is mostly driven by experience not by preference. Not many people learn to know more then 2 or 3 trackers in their career.
- mooreds 13y agoAbsolutely. How many people do a survey of these types of tools, let alone work deeply enough with a number of them to know the warts? I've been in the position to choose bug trackers for two companies I've worked for, and I still don't feel competent to vote.
- jchung 13y agoI question whether people need to learn more than 2 or 3 trackers over a career. Bug tracking tools are remarkably well developed. Once you find something that works, start battering bigger fish.
- shardling 13y agoThat attitude doesn't work for open source projects, where you need to worry about any barrier to pulling in new contributors.
- columbo 13y agoI've used a ton of bugtrackers, GitHub is the only one I've been able to hand to a non-techy client so they can create bugs. This has been a huge frustration for me when it comes to bug tracking. I have multiple clients who just aren't technical people and when they see the wall of options that bugzilla and mantis offer it causes them to give up and email me directly. I even tried vbulletin for awhile, but that had its own problems. GitHub (once you get past the signup) is perfect in this regard. Just open a ticket and then comment on it. I wish GitHub had more in regards to bug tracking, for example being able to create states (open, in progress, closed) as well as labels. These days I'm sure there are comparable solutions but having the issue system through github means one less service I need to track, which is also nice (client gets code, client has issue tracking, done). With all that said I wouldn't use github issue tracking for complex multi-stage applications where the environment is an important factor in the problem.
- captn3m0 13y agoWe use redmine internally, but I find myself preferring Github for issues. The interface is much simpler and easier to use. Redmine, on the other hand has 10-15 fields for every issue. It may help with very large projects but most of it is never used for small-sized projects.
- EliRivers 13y agoPiece of paper taped to side of monitor, with badly written reference to a page in someone else's daybook, including cryptic calculations that are actually not at all related and enough circular rings from my tea mug to create a sort of mutant Olympics logo.
- spingu 13y agoasana
- namityadav 13y agoHow do you use Asana for bug-tracking? We're considering doing so too (We already use Asana for task management, etc), and would love some pointers from someone who's already done so.
- mostafah 13y agoThey have a guide (http://asana.com/guide/videos/bug-tracking http://asana.com/guide/videos/bug-tracking) in their help pages about it. I use it too, but not their way. I don’t have a “Bugs” project. I have a “Bug” tag that set to bugs in different projects. If you already have a projects structure that works for you and can hold issues like bugs, this might work better.
- pbiggar 13y agoWe use asana as a bug-tracker at https://circleci.com https://circleci.com. Its pretty good, and doesn't get in your way, but we can't really integrate it into our workflow. They don't have Hipchat integration, and their API isn't full enough to set it up ourselves with Zapier.Their support also isn't very good, they replied to the problem with basically "dont care".
- chenster 13y agounfuddle
- edw519 13y agoOther. Write code without bugs. (I say this in jest, but only a little.) Think about it... I know so many programmers who get lazy because they have such good debugging tools (Let me just slam something out there and let the debugger catch it.) I hate this. If we developers would slow down and think a little more about what we're building, we may find a dramatically decreased need for debugging. Variable local or global? Right variable name? Should that be a function? How much am I repeating myself? How should the data be structured for its intended uses? What's the best way to handle recursion? Where might memory leak? Where's the best place to do this? Which is the best technology for this need? And most of all: Will the next programmer be able to read this and tell what it's doing before they break it? Slow down. Plan more. Think deeper. Debug less.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nilkn 13y agoBug trackers are more fully featured project management tools these days. We use Fog Bugz and some of our non-coders are using it to record what they're working on/accomplishing.
- serichsen 13y agoI agree, but this still will not make a bug tracker superfluous---if only for tracking change requests.
- beaumartinez 13y agoBugs are inevitable. No matter how much you think about the problem, there will always be things that slip between the cracks.
- pcowans 13y agoThis is true, but you should probably still put more emphasis on avoiding them than optimising your process for fixing them.
- clubhi 13y ago
- creature 13y agoI've been using Phabricator a lot recently, and it's ace. We started using it because we wanted to start doing code review, and the task tracking came along 'for free'. It's nice & lightweight (in terms of UI), is usable from the commandline via the arcanist tool, and integrates well with the other Phabricator tools. Downsides? The website's sense of humour is irritating if it doesn't click with you. You have to host it yourself, which can be about a morning of setup. The documentation can be a little bit sparse. But it's the first bug tracking/developer workflow tool I've used that I've actually liked. And I like it a lot.
- jevinskie 13y agoLLVM/Clang uses it for patch reviews. It seems to integrate nicely with their mailing lists.
- pero 13y agoI'm a PM in digital advertising and normally I wouldn't work with code - I largely build one-offs with vendors so issues/bugs and deliverables - Sifter is by far the best I've used. It does one thing and it does it really really well, has a negligible learning curve, and looks pretty - oh, and it's cheap. https://sifterapp.com/ https://sifterapp.com/ Not that there's a reason why it wouldn't be used with code, just a disclaimer.
- varsketiz 13y agoAssembla (http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/98335/Looking-for-a-Git-Bug-Tracker-Look-No-More.aspx http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/98335/...)
- Al-Khwarizmi 13y agoI voted for Google Code because even if it's not the most full-featured tracker, it's the one with which I get non-techie users to actually report issues. There are no complicated required fields, just name and description, and it mostly doesn't require registration or login because most people are already logged into some Google service. This means that users only need to write their problem and press a button, so they actually do it instead of being scared away by the interface, which is what happened to me with other trackers.
- pcowans 13y agoYouTrack (http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/index.jsp http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/index.jsp) is my favourite out of everything I've ever seriously used. Physical cards stuck to the wall also works well for small, co-located teams. The important things are that someone needs to put a decent amount of time into managing the bug list, and you need to be actually willing to devote appropriate resources to fixing them (or better still, eliminating the root causes). If those aren't present you'll just end up with an unmanageable dumping ground regardless of where it lives.
- dav-id 13y agoI am a big fan of TFS particularly since it allows for the feedback client to be used to get direct feedback (Video, Audio, Screenshots etc) into it from selected users in a very unintimidating way.
- rch 13y agoI just want to mention that Trac development has picked up steam over the last couple of years. If it has been a while since you've tried it, you might give it a fresh look sometime.
- eccp 13y agoConductor (http://conductor-app.com http://conductor-app.com) is my current favourite.
- passwordless 13y agoHi, I'm Joe Stump CEO/founder of Sprint.ly. Totally biased opinion here, but I'd like to add Sprint.ly to the list. We built Sprint.ly specifically to encourage/engage "the rest of the business". If you're looking for a super technical tool, we're not that, but if you need a tool to get business users engaged and on the same page we might be worth a look.
- frederickcook 13y ago+1 for sprintly, been using it for almost a year at Moveline. business people know exactly what to do when a bug comes in, and can accept/reject, comment, screenshot, etc. when a Dev marks it as complete
- sstarr 13y agoFor client projects I'm a big fan of Lighthouse (https://lighthouseapp.com/ https://lighthouseapp.com/). It has a great balance of advanced features and ease of use for non-techies. * Tickets can be created and updated via email * Using the GitHub service hook, you can tag commit messages so that they appear as comments on a ticket as well as change the state of the ticket (For example: "Refactor widget behaviour [#123 state:resolved]") * You can setup milestones (with or without a due date) and assign tickets to them * Bulk editing of tickets * Markdown in ticket description and comment fields * You can easily create "buckets" of tickets based on search terms and filters * Bugsnag and Airbrake can be configured to automatically create tickets for new exceptions in your app * Probably some other great features that I've forgotten to mention
- why-el 13y agoGood old Rake with the # FIXME directive right in my source code.
- weinzierl 13y agoFossil (from D. Richard Hipp, SQLite author)
- st3fan 13y agoJIRA is missing from the list.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- harshadura 13y agoi like jira :-)
- mariocesar 13y agoI'm using jira for something close to 80 projects, most of them code projects, and others for Recruitement, Ideas and Writing. I'm surprised as many others that Jira is not on the list
- dkuntz2 13y agoIs it better than the one coupled with BitBucket? I can't stand BitBucket's bug tracker.
- mohas 13y agoI can't believe there is no redmine here!
- burgreblast 13y agowe use https://trello.com/ https://trello.com/ We build buckets called raw feedback, todo, and urgent. Drag issues into the appropriate bucket. When they're done, devs move to "please test" and from there they then go to done when the issue has been validated. Simple, free, screenshots, videos, upload from iOS. Tag people to issues. Works for us. No timeline or "63% done", but we don't need that.
- tokenrove 13y agoSD (http://syncwith.us/sd/ http://syncwith.us/sd/) is a promising approach.
- valcker 13y agoRedmine