Tuesday, December 05, 2006

bug tracking tool

right so the last 2 days i have been working on setting up a bug tracking tool for my boss. Some how i knew that one of these days the idea of acting smart was going to backfire. ;) ;) So here was my boss telling me how he was confident that i would help him out with setting up a bug tracking tool for his new project.

nways i got down to the task and did a bit of R&D on the different issue/bug tracking tools and here's what i found:

jira - if you have the cash, the best tool in the market

bugzilla - the king of open source and free tools, its heavily loaded but complex to setup, plus its written in perl

roundup - python based and quite good

But the ones i picked :

mantis - PHP based but simple to work with, its also called the unofficial 'light-weight' bugzilla

JTrac - Java based, not very impressive UI but ideal if your target audience is small. Best part is that its demo version is quite good. It has embedded jetty web-server and HSQLDB at the backend. You can be up and running in minutes, plus maintaining it is quite simple.

i'm sure you guessed what i used to impress my boss. Simple but working is still the flavour of the day. :)

3 comments:

Peter Thomas said...

The suspense is killing me :) So which one did you choose?

P.S: I happen to be the developer of JTrac, it is being actively developed and it would be great to get your inputs on where it could be improved - even if you don't decide to use it.

afulay said...

oh actually i did use jtrac. The setup and maintenance time for jtrac is bare minimum (using the default setup).

Few issues i faced:
- I could not hookup jtrac to my company's mail server and there is no documentation for that.

Things i would like to see in jtrac:
- option to connect the authentication module to an open LDAP or AD server.

Thats the most i can think of at this point in time. Will let you know if i remember anything else.

Peter Thomas said...

Connecting to mail is easy, just enter the SMTP server hostname (or IP) in the OPTIONS --> Manage Settings screen.

LDAP / AD is in the roadmap and will be released soon.

Feel free to use the forums for help:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=552477