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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?

#61

Post by harshadura »

gnosis wrote: post #38
polynomial wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any 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.

I'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'…

its quite funny to see you know about bitbucket and never heard about jira before. ;-)

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

#62

Post by yajoe »

gnosis wrote: post #38
polynomial wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any 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.

I'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'…

That'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.

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

#64

Post by burgreblast »

we use 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.

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

#65

Post by gnosis »

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…

"Slow down"? Please try to convince the typical manager, executive, or VC that calls the shots to slow down.

Death marches by overworked, sleep deprived, and understaffed development teams are the norm in the industry. It's a wonder that most products aren't even more bug-riddled than they already are.

I would love to live in a world where every developer was competent if not brilliant, and had all the time, training, and motivation in the world to write nothing but perfect code at his leisure.

If you know of a way to this world, I'm all ears.

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

#66

Post by JoshTriplett »

Confusion wrote: post #39
JoshTriplett wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes 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).

I'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.

Jira 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.

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

#67

Post by Confusion »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #66
Confusion wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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.

Jira 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, an…

Being 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.

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

#69

Post by Rexxar »

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…

Did you misread "debugger" instead of "bug tracker"? Your comment doesn't make any sense to me in the current context.

If you are really against "bug tracker". I don't really understand as they are often mainly used to report new needs, requirement and enhancement rather than crash due to poor coding practices.

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