Apparently I’m not the only one who has had difficulty finding a suitable bug tracking system for a software development project. Garret Dimon is not impressed with what’s out there.
Of course, if you have the cash to spare, go and get a copy of Joel’s FogBugz – I have never used it, but at $129USD per user and lots of respectable customers, it should be pretty polished.
Also, if you’re a .NET shop – start migrating to Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS). Bug tracking, work item tracking and source control are all integrated into Visual Studio. Just imagine checking-in some code and closing a bug at the same time – “this code check-in fixes this bug”. That’s traceability for you.
If your team is new to bug tracking, then I suggest you have a good read of Joel’s article – Painless Bug Tracking and make sure your system gets used properly.
At one of my recent projects, they did not have a bug tracking system and it would have been difficult to get them to spend money on a product because “we’ve come this far without it, why should we bother?” *sigh*.
My Recommendation: BugTracker.NET
BugTracker.NET is a free .NET 1.1 web app that uses SQL Server or MSDE as it’s database. What I like about it is that it’s simple to use and customisable to fit your environment.
Define your own statuses and workflow, or stick with the simple one it installs with.
If everybody using it is already on a windows domain, then you can use windows integrated authentication – which means one less username/password to administer and remember.
If you choose, you can set it up to use E-Mail. For instance, I get an email every time a bug is added/updated – this lets me keep a QA eye on everything that’s happening.
My Experience and Recommendations
It took me two weeks after setting it up to actually get the team of 10 using the system. Now, I believe they couldn’t live without it.
The way that I enticed them to use it was whenever they asked me to have a look at some code, or fix a bug I said “Is it in bug tracker? Create a bug in bug tracker and assign it to me, then I will look at it”. After that, the others started to do the same.
The bug statuses I have setup are:
- New,
- In Progress,
- Checked-In,
- Closed,
- Resolved, and
- Waiting for Customer.
The priorities I have setup are:
- Low,
- Medium,
- High, and
- Show-stopper.
A bug is not a bug unless…
It has these three things:
- Steps to reproduce (repro) – e.g. I opened MyApp, Clicked X, Clicked Y, Typed ABC then pressed ENTER
- Expected Result – e.g. The application should show “saved” message.
- Actual Result – e.g. FormatException on line 22 of MainForm.cs
Summary
Whatever you do, Keep It Simple and make it EASY to submit bugs – the last thing you want is un-recorded bugs.
Technorati tags: BugTracker, .Net, Bug Tracking, FogBUGZ
7 Comments
Have you looked into http://www.edgewall.com/trac/ at all? We use it at work, integrated into Subversion and aren’t having any problems with it.Al.
Hi Alistair,I’ve used Trac before, but have never installed it myself.From what I can see, to run it on windows you would have to install Apache and/or Install Python to make it work with IIS.If you already had this infrastructure in your environment, I’m sure Trac would be a great option.But for getting something simple up and running in a Windows development environment, I think BugTracker.NET is the way to go.Grant
Did you try this one – http://www.axosoft.com/(it’s expensive, though)Or try Issue Tracker, free bug tracking -http://www.ikosoftware.com/
BugTracker.NET can be integrated with Subversion too. That is, it comes with a script that Subversion will execute so that as you commit to Subversion referencing the bugid, it will tell BugTracker.NET about the file revisions so that you can then view the bug and then drill down into what file revisions are associated with the bug.
I use BugWiki. It’s dead easy, it just works and other than that it gets out of thw way.
http://www.bugwiki.com
Is it just me or is Neil Davis a BugWiki employee. I have been researching some bug tracking tools recently and everywhere I see, there are some recent comments about how good bugwiki is (twitter, some bug tracker comparisons etc). I look at bugwiki and it’s no better than scribbling down stuff in a spreadsheet. I am not saying it’s bad (everything has it’s uses), but persistent comments stating how great bugwiki is, is pretty darn suspicious. Especially on a post that is a nearly a year old?
We use TeamSupport.com (http://www.TeamSupport.com) and it really works well for our team. They have integrated a bug tracker with a help desk system, and the GUI is great.