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Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

#21

Post by creature »

I'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.

Re: Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

#22

Post by [deleted] »

edw519 wrote: post #19

Other. 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 glo…

[deleted]

Re: Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

#23

Post by pero »

I'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/

Not that there's a reason why it wouldn't be used with code, just a disclaimer.

Re: Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

#25

Post by nilkn »

edw519 wrote: post #19

Other. 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 glo…

Bug 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.

Re: Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

#26

Post by jevinskie »

creature wrote: post #21

I'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…

LLVM/Clang uses it for patch reviews. It seems to integrate nicely with their mailing lists.

Re: Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

#27

Post by serichsen »

edw519 wrote: post #19

Other. 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 glo…

I agree, but this still will not make a bug tracker superfluous---if only for tracking change requests.

Re: Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

#28

Post by mooreds »

erikb wrote: post #15
wting wrote: post #12

I'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.

I 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.

Absolutely. 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.

Re: Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

#29

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

I 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.

Re: Poll: What's your favorite bug tracker?

#30

Post by beaumartinez »

edw519 wrote: post #19

Other. 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 glo…

Bugs are inevitable. No matter how much you think about the problem, there will always be things that slip between the cracks.
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