Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having used many different bug tracking, help desk, and ticketing softwares… Atlassian does a dam good job. Totally customizable screens, fields, and workflows with a modern UI. A decent webservice API I’ve integrated a few external tools into without much difficulty. I’ve also written a few gadgets and plugins and received a decent amount of attention through their plugin marketplace. Maybe the admin that setup your…
> Maybe the admin that setup your install or business workflow did a bad job? I think this is key. There's so much customization allowed that its easy to get wrong. Your experiences can vary drastically between a well configured instance and a poorly configured one.
For example, of course only QA people can use "Testing passed" transition. Of course there should be x, y, z fields filled out to be able to create the ticket. Well we're at it, let's make sure only the product manager can close a ticket with 'wontfix', and only the release manager can change a fixversion.
This is a really common problem with any workflow tool, where well-intentioned control points get in the way of actually Getting Things Done, both from the perspective of not thinking through all the complex scenarios (what? I have to fill out 5 fields before I can close this as a duplicate??) and from not trusting your employees (don't worry, a jr. dev is not going to re-assign a fix version even though they can -- or at least, they won't do it twice).