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Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team?

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Re: Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team?

#51

Post by aero142 »

tophercyll wrote: post #37

Our three man team recently took advantage of the FogBugz YC offer and gave it a try. There were some things we liked about it, but in the end it felt too heavy for us. It was more of a support ticketing system than an easy way for a small team to track their bugs (although it would probably be good if you had a lot of external users reporting bugs). The other problem was that even a lot of custom tweaking, we never…

I know Wave has been much maligned, but I'm really excited about the potential as a base framework for other things, like a bug tracker/wiki/email/IM/design meeting/project planning all wrapped in one.

Re: Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team?

#52

Post by dtran »

tophercyll wrote: post #37

Our three man team recently took advantage of the FogBugz YC offer and gave it a try. There were some things we liked about it, but in the end it felt too heavy for us. It was more of a support ticketing system than an easy way for a small team to track their bugs (although it would probably be good if you had a lot of external users reporting bugs). The other problem was that even a lot of custom tweaking, we never…

Hmm, I hadn't considering wave as a bug tracking system. Our google doc spreadsheet was already too busy, so I can't imagine Wave making that any better. Really interesting idea though - maybe useful to organize team sprints/small projects.

Re: Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team?

#53

Post by dtran »

Overview of Small teams bug tracking software:

Unfuddle - Hosted solution, SVN/Git hosting + really clean bug tracking. Free for 2 people, $9/mo for small teams. Has Mylyn support and a OS X dashboard widget

Bugzilla - everyone seems to agree it's too heavy and I don't want to deal with installing and configuring it

Trac - Pretty lightweight, good integration with SVN, and useful built-in wiki, quick, simple installation

Speckle - To-do list with multiple checkboxes, made by HN's very own elliotkember

Pivotal Tracker - hosted solution with drag n drop interface, allows you to import a list of existing bugs in CSV format. I found the interface a little clunky for my taste.

Others mentioned that I haven't checked out: Fogzbugz, Redmine, Lighthouse, Flyspray, Purifyapp, Codebase

Re: Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team?

#54

Post by projectileboy »

m0nty wrote: post #16
dtran wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably meant this as a joke, but I have a friend who is hyper-organized with all of her to-dos on a whiteboard... different sections are different things/different priority levels. Maybe we will hack together a Wii whiteboard Johnny Chung Lee style and use virtual post-its! ( http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ )

You probably meant that as a joke too, but I think a virtual whiteboard with Post-Its would be a great product. Colour-coded notes to indicate priority, clustering by physical location on the screen, larger text sizes for very-urgent-do-it-today tasks. You could draw lines on the whiteboard to show the relationship between notes, could have the ability to roll back to previous days to track history, attach files to P…

stixy.com is exactly that. The usability is pretty good.

Re: Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team?

#58

Post by nick-dap »

fpotter wrote: post #4

Try Pivotal Tracker. It's more geared for todos / feature stuff (and does it really well), but you can use it for bugs, too. If you're tracking more than 50 or so bugs, I could see wanting to use something else, though.

I keep bugs and do email/support via FogBugz, but when it gets down to crunch time I always end up back in Pivotal Tracker for my weekly to do. I work alone.

FogBugz email integration is top notch, but the time tracking and staying on target for a release is definitely tuned for a larger team. In "list of cases" view there isn't an immediate visual cue to what you can get done in time for a release. Going into reports you get nice graphs with confidence curves for the finish date of a release. Entirely overkill for a small team; possibly a life saver for a larger one. A side note, I was able to show a non technical person how to use FogBugz to work with email with surprisingly good results. The person found it a very natural transition from plain email and appreciated the case tracking capabilities of FogBugz.

Pivotal feels much more natural to me and always helps me stay on track. I can immediately see what I can get done this week and what I will have to push back or revise. I also find its 3 point system for estimating remarkably accurate. The tool has actually driven me to get things done as well, which is more than I can ask of any tracking system.

So,

FogBugz: a formal bug tracking system with excellent email integration and fine grained estimation and tracking.

Pivotal Tracker: a "to do" tracking system, with coarse estimation and tracking that works better for fast iterations and small teams.

Re: Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team?

#59

Post by tophercyll »

dtran wrote: post #52
tophercyll wrote: post #37

Our three man team recently took advantage of the FogBugz YC offer and gave it a try. There were some things we liked about it, but in the end it felt too heavy for us. It was more of a support ticketing system than an easy way for a small team to track their bugs (although it would probably be good if you had a lot of external users reporting bugs). The other problem was that even a lot of custom tweaking, we never…

Hmm, I hadn't considering wave as a bug tracking system. Our google doc spreadsheet was already too busy, so I can't imagine Wave making that any better. Really interesting idea though - maybe useful to organize team sprints/small projects.

Yeah, we definitely had to trim down how much info we were storing. Obviously that was a sacrifice, but the upside was a lower barrier to entering a new feature or bug. We really do just treat it like a digital whiteboard (even to the point of posting pictures of our actual whiteboard until we can transcribe them). And the realtime collaborative editing kills a traditional wiki.

Re: Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team?

#60

Post by kareemm »

abovesun wrote: post #57

Unfuddle is very good, very light and easy, it specially helpfull if you are using Eclipse IDE, unfuddle has Mylyn connector to synchronize bugs with ide.

+1 for Unfuddle. Has the simplest, most intuitive UI of any bug tracker that I've used...

FogBugz is good, but almost certainly heavy for what you need.

Bugzilla's UI makes me want to claw my eyes out - pay the 9 bucks for an interface that wasn't designed by a programmer.

Jira's probably on the heavier side for what you need, too.

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