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Small development teams, what are your biggest qualms with bug management tools?

• janderson33 11y ago
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• Jemaclus 11y ago
  The biggest one for me is that bug management tools tend to be "another app" that I have to deal with in addition to issue tracking (not necessarily bugs) and task management (also not necessarily bugs), as well as potentially being separate from code changes (i.e. matching commits to bug fixes or features). The cognitive overhead is pretty high. At my previous team, we largely used Github Issues to track everything. This worked, for the most part, but it made tracking things that weren't code-related iffy. For instance, designs for new features don't necessarily belong in Github Issues, nor do feature requests, or non-code related tasks like setting up a new server. There's just only so much cognitive overhead we can have to track all of these things, and adding Yet Another App for bug tracking is tricky. That's just the first thing that pops into my head. Good luck. :)
  • kenrogers 11y ago
    Hey thanks so much for your feedback. So if there was a SaaS tool designed for development teams that cleanly and simply managed issue tracking and task management, would that be something you would use? What would you need to make switching to a tool like that worth it?
    • Jemaclus 11y ago
      It would have to cleanly and simply manage all of the different needs that small teams have: bug tracking, issue tracking, feature requests, prioritization, code changes, etc. My rule of thumb for switching to new tech is that the new app must be a 10x improvement over the old app, whether that's 10x cheaper, 10x faster, 10x features, or however I wanna measure it. If it's not that much better, then the paperwork/training hassle isn't gonna be worth it for my team to switch. One example is the Hipchat/Slack discussion. We used Hipchat before Slack was a thing. Slack looks awesome. But is it 10x more awesome than Hipchat? I've never been convinced, and it's just not worth the hassle of setting everyone up with Slack accounts and software for the incremental improvement. Right now, bug tracking is tedious but manageable. You need to make it 10x easier, 10x cheaper, or 10x more features (or some smaller combination thereof) in order for people to consider it a no-brainer to switch. And to be honest, that's a tall order. You risk turning into a Salesforce-esque nightmare where you're trying to do everything at once. If you could somehow unify one or two of those things into one coherent, easy to use app (a la Zenefits or Workday or ZenPayroll), then you'd be on the right track. Good luck!
      • kenrogers 11y ago
        Thanks so much for all this feedback, you've been a huge help. Now I'm off to do some brainstorming, sketching, prototyping, and asking more people more questions :)