tomhudson's Journal: Trouble Ticket and Bug Tracking Systems

I have to set up a bug tracking and trouble ticket system at work for the developers and testers. Bugzilla is out, since we want to eventually expand the system to handle customer trouble tickets as well. Both Open Ticket Request System and zenTrack looked good, but neither one worked when I tried to install to a non-default location. Symlinking from apache's htdoc directory (after changing apache's config files to follow symlinks) only fixed part of the problem - it looks like both these programs expect to be installed inside your web server's local space, rather than from either their own /home directory (my preferred route),/i> , or a users' public_html directory.

For the time being, I'll probably just set up a CMS and wiki so we can start editing the documentation for the existing system, and post/discuss the bugs in the new system, but this is just a stop-gap measure. Short of writing your own, what other LAMP solutions have you tried?

I don't really use it, but...

[arb]

Where I work we have JIRA [atlassian.com], which doesn't suck too much. It's not free, but it does seem pretty good - the main reason I rarely use it is that no-one else on my project uses it... We also use Confluence [atlassian.com] for our documentation btw.

Re:I don't really use it, but...

[FortKnox]

We use JIRA here. Pretty good system, if you ask me.

Request Tracker?

[numbski]

That seems like the open source defacto-standard. It's ugly by default, but functional.

RT

[BrenBren]

I've used RT [bestpractical.com] in the past. It's not bad.

My employer recently switched from that to some Windows-only mess from Sofront Software (a company in India). There are serious issues if you're not using the latest Internet Explorer, so my Mac iBook doesn't help me on this one point. :(

open source issue tracking

[Zeriel]

IssueManager, if you can stand PHP-based stuff.

Mantis?

[nizo]

It isn't just a cool looking bug. Home [mantisbt.org].

Our Webmistress...

[eno2001]

...installed Drupal and the case tracking module that comes with it. It looked pretty good. Fairly flexible too. Our environment will also eventually be letting users enter/update cases as well. So while I have limited experience, it's something to look at I suppose.

Re:Our Webmistress...

[tomhudson]

Thanks. Though the way it looks, I'll probably have to write one myself, because all the ones I've tried are a waste of time (path problems in every one).

TrackStudio

[fcgreg]

About two years ago at my employ we undertook the somewhat large effort of researching all of the popular "tracking systems" on the market, both proprietary and Open Source. Our goals were roughly the following:

• Able to track many different configurable types of issues simultaneously.
• Easily customizable workflows
• Solid security model with scalable permissions. This needed to facilitate all user-types that would be using the system, including customers.
• Ability to do at least simple reporting
• Web-based,

Re:TrackStudio

[tomhudson]

Thanks. Unfortunatell, it'll be a few weeks before I can revisit this - today I got a first lock at the actual c code I have to fix. 18,823 lines, no comments, no documentation, no tests scripts, no make files, naming conventions look like it was put together by former vb coders, everything appears to be tightly coupled ... Priceless :-(

Its worse than I thought it was.

After its fixed, I've got to rewrite it to work on a cluster (and put together a working cluster).

THEN ... if I don't go nuts ... :-)

Re:TrackStudio

[fcgreg]

My goodness... I think I actually felt PAIN reading that. You have our sympathies! :-)

Good luck...

Re:TrackStudio

[tomhudson]

Thanks. I got another 15,000 lines this afternoon, plus an interesting data transform that I have to work on next Monday, so this weekend is going to be busy playing catch-up.

Instead of doing it all by hand, I'm going to use some code formatters and some custom scripts to mod the code, insert custom overloaded functions, generate the docs, build and populated tables, etc. This way, as my understanding of what they were doing grows, I can just update the scripts and reparse everything.