Bug Trackers I Have Known
Or at least, bug trackers I have known lately, because I've used too darned many over the years. Someone recently asked me to summarize my experiences, and who can resist that kind of request?
If I were running a team of 10+ developers and choosing the tools, I'd start with FogBugz, which to my mind still does the best job I've seen of tying everything together and giving good predictive information. But I may be prejudiced, since they paid me to write a book
. I've used FogBugz on real-world projects and been quite happy with it, and for a medium-sized dev team I recommend it.
But these days, that's not the sort of development team I'm usually a part of. Typically, I'm coming into a situation where a smaller team - 2 or 3 developers, 1 or 2 business folks - have already picked their tools, and I need to adapt. The collaboration software ranges from simple lists to full-blown project management tools. Here are some of the ones I've had to deal with in the past 2 years.
It may be heresy for me to say this, but I've never had an especially good experience with Basecamp. It tends to be too much overhead for a small team and to be too opinionated (in my never-humble opinion). Unless you're making a commitment to it for multiple projects, it's just too much bother to use, and too hard to customize.
Redmine is also not one of my favorites. Yes, it's written in Rails, but other than that, I think it's just behind the times. Entering a lot of data fields on a pure text interface doesn't mesh well with the way I do business. If they add a really slick git integration I might take another look, but my overall feeling is that there are just better tools out there.
The venerable Trac is another one that I can find my way around when I need to, but can't especially recommend. The integrated wiki is on the clunky side, and the whole system feels slow (that might be a consequence of the installations I've had access to, of course). I don't like Trac's reporting or workflow either.
No Kahuna has been excellent for small projects with clients who are less technically savvy. It offers an extremely simple interface, closer to a task manager than a bug tracker, but that's what some people need. It supports multiple projects and tasks, and ranking things into buckets, and tracking who's working on them. There are things I don't like - such as multiple clicks to get back to the full task list after finishing a tasb - but this is one of the tools I end up recommending to people who just want collaborative tracking without a lot of fuss.
Hiveminder is another collaborative todo list that I've used on multiple projects. It's got more bells and whistles than No Kahuna (and sometimes all the AJAXy stuff seems to slow it down), which makes it harder to learn to use effectively. I also find that its notion that you have a big bucket of "up for grabs" tasks doesn't always play well with knowing who is responsible for what.
Lighthouse is another darling of the Rails world that I can take or leave. I like that it is low-ceremony, focusing on what needs to be done rather than on entering a bunch of excess data. I don't so much like the navigation or searching, which seem confusing at times.
Pivotal Tracker I've just started using on one project, and I like it so far. The drag-and-drop UI makes the client happy because they can prioritize the work, and the simple tracking makes me happy because I can get it done. I don't like the 0,1,2,3 scale for story points, and so far I don't know how well its velocity tracking/prediction will work, but my initial impression is that this is one I'm going to hang on to.
If I were running a team of 10+ developers and choosing the tools, I'd start with FogBugz, which to my mind still does the best job I've seen of tying everything together and giving good predictive information. But I may be prejudiced, since they paid me to write a book
. I've used FogBugz on real-world projects and been quite happy with it, and for a medium-sized dev team I recommend it.
But these days, that's not the sort of development team I'm usually a part of. Typically, I'm coming into a situation where a smaller team - 2 or 3 developers, 1 or 2 business folks - have already picked their tools, and I need to adapt. The collaboration software ranges from simple lists to full-blown project management tools. Here are some of the ones I've had to deal with in the past 2 years.
It may be heresy for me to say this, but I've never had an especially good experience with Basecamp. It tends to be too much overhead for a small team and to be too opinionated (in my never-humble opinion). Unless you're making a commitment to it for multiple projects, it's just too much bother to use, and too hard to customize.
Redmine is also not one of my favorites. Yes, it's written in Rails, but other than that, I think it's just behind the times. Entering a lot of data fields on a pure text interface doesn't mesh well with the way I do business. If they add a really slick git integration I might take another look, but my overall feeling is that there are just better tools out there.
The venerable Trac is another one that I can find my way around when I need to, but can't especially recommend. The integrated wiki is on the clunky side, and the whole system feels slow (that might be a consequence of the installations I've had access to, of course). I don't like Trac's reporting or workflow either.
No Kahuna has been excellent for small projects with clients who are less technically savvy. It offers an extremely simple interface, closer to a task manager than a bug tracker, but that's what some people need. It supports multiple projects and tasks, and ranking things into buckets, and tracking who's working on them. There are things I don't like - such as multiple clicks to get back to the full task list after finishing a tasb - but this is one of the tools I end up recommending to people who just want collaborative tracking without a lot of fuss.
Hiveminder is another collaborative todo list that I've used on multiple projects. It's got more bells and whistles than No Kahuna (and sometimes all the AJAXy stuff seems to slow it down), which makes it harder to learn to use effectively. I also find that its notion that you have a big bucket of "up for grabs" tasks doesn't always play well with knowing who is responsible for what.
Lighthouse is another darling of the Rails world that I can take or leave. I like that it is low-ceremony, focusing on what needs to be done rather than on entering a bunch of excess data. I don't so much like the navigation or searching, which seem confusing at times.
Pivotal Tracker I've just started using on one project, and I like it so far. The drag-and-drop UI makes the client happy because they can prioritize the work, and the simple tracking makes me happy because I can get it done. I don't like the 0,1,2,3 scale for story points, and so far I don't know how well its velocity tracking/prediction will work, but my initial impression is that this is one I'm going to hang on to.