[Off topic] Web-based Bug Tracking Software

Folks

We are getting rather fed up with our old bug tracking system and looking to
move to a web-based one. The main features we're looking for (apart from the
obvious ability to record, prioritize, assign and track bugs) are:

- Web-browser client (exclusively or in addition to a Windows client) which
allows submission of bugs and querying of the bugs database.
- E-mail bug submission
- Full text search
- SQL database backend.
- Flexible HTML reporting capability
- Relatively low cost

If anyone has any recommendations, we'd be interested to hear them, even if
they don't have all of these features (except the last, which is mandatory
:-))

Blair McGlashan
Object Arts
http://www.object-arts.com

I'll make a stupid comment that I'm sure I'll regret later.

Why don't we write one?

It could be the ultimate Dolphin tutorial.  It is a real-world application,
witth standard and applet versions, ODBC, HTML output, MVP throughout.
Well documented and clean code, (with unit tests even!), that demonstrate in
a real-world setting how to do Dolphin development right.

Most things don't look too terribly difficult except for the full text
search, and that's not a problem if you have access to a W2K server or
something else you can index a bunch of HTML docs with.   Some of the parts
look close to things that are already in goodie collections, and many look
re-usable so the particapants might get something out of it themselves.

And I'll go ahead and answer my own question: because it might be hard to
find people to help, and people who do want to help are probably very busy
with too many of their own projects as it is.  And it might be hard for
multiple people to work on something like that efficiently.  Etc.

But wouldn't it be neat?

Jerry Bell
[hidden email]




"Blair McGlashan" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:96c1m9$kg7qj$[hidden email]...
> Folks
>
> We are getting rather fed up with our old bug tracking system and looking
to
> move to a web-based one. The main features we're looking for (apart from
the
> obvious ability to record, prioritize, assign and track bugs) are:
>
> - Web-browser client (exclusively or in addition to a Windows client)
which
> allows submission of bugs and querying of the bugs database.
> - E-mail bug submission
> - Full text search
> - SQL database backend.
> - Flexible HTML reporting capability
> - Relatively low cost
>
> If anyone has any recommendations, we'd be interested to hear them, even
if
> they don't have all of these features (except the last, which is mandatory
> :-))
>
> Blair McGlashan
> Object Arts
> http://www.object-arts.com
>
>

On Tue, 13 Feb 2001 19:29:32 -0000, "Blair McGlashan"
<[hidden email]> wrote:

>Folks
>
>We are getting rather fed up with our old bug tracking system and looking to
>move to a web-based one.

Have you looked at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org yet?  It's free. It's
webbased. It's SQL (mysql actually) based.  Surely, it's flexible.
However, I never tried to install it myself and it's a little bit too
complex for my taste.

Therefore, I tend to like the suggestion to think about making this a
Dolphin project.  Is there a web application framework similar to Java
Servlets etc. available for Dolphin yet?

bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust____Truth until Paradox!____________________
     Jobs? ==> [hidden email]   www.baltic-online.de

"Jerry Bell" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:96c9ad$k3uuk$[hidden email]...

>But wouldn't it be neat?

Yes it would. I have a list of things I want to do as long as my arm, but
one of them is to work on a group project. Count me in!

Steve
swaring at ozemail.com.au

Yeah, who needs sleep, anyway?

Anyone else interested?

-Jerry


"Steve Waring" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:96dv83$ij2a2$[hidden email]...

Hi all,

"Jerry Bell" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:96e257$kfvbe$[hidden email]... but
> > one of them is to work on a group project. Count me in!
> >
> > Steve
> > swaring at ozemail.com.au

If we make it a proper XP project, you can count me in (maybe even document
it and publish it in book form ;-)


Ted

Blair and Andy,

What do you think of this? Making it into an XP project would involve you to
be the customer and provide us with the user stories, therefore asking a bit
of time from your side as well. But then again, Object Arts would benefit
from it in many ways - it would be fit for purpose as you would define it,
it would be written in Dolphin Smalltalk with all the benefits that you know
even better than us, it might result in another book on Dolphin, it might
end up being an integrated part of the development environment, and so on.

Ted

I've heard good things about FogBUGZ by Fog Creek Software. They have
a 30 day demo you can try.

http://www.fogcreek.com

Chris.
--
http://www.double.co.nz/smalltalk

Chris

You wrote in message news:[hidden email]...
> I've heard good things about FogBUGZ by Fog Creek Software. They have
> a 30 day demo you can try.
>

Thanks for the suggestion. We did take a look at FogBUGZ, but frankly its
functionality seems pretty limited. Maybe we are missing something.

We're currently evaluating at a product called TestTracker Pro
(http://www.seapine.com/ttpro.html) that appears to do everything we need,
and which so far appears stable and well thought out. Its a little
expensive, but if one values ones time...

Regards

Blair

Ted

You wrote in message news:96g854$kud94$[hidden email]...
>
> What do you think of this? Making it into an XP project would involve you
to
> be the customer and provide us with the user stories, therefore asking a
bit
> of time from your side as well. But then again, Object Arts would benefit
> from it in many ways - it would be fit for purpose as you would define it,
> it would be written in Dolphin Smalltalk with all the benefits that you
know
> even better than us, it might result in another book on Dolphin, it might
> end up being an integrated part of the development environment, and so on.

I think it certainly would be a good application to do (it would make a much
more interesting tutorial with a more useful end-result than the usual
fare), but we've enough on our plate at the moment. We think we've found a
product (TestTracker Pro) which does what we want rather well, and it makes
sense for us to buy it in if it saves us time in building and maintaining
our own solution, and which we can use right away.

There would definitely appear to be a gap in the market for a comprehensive
Windows based solution that has remote working capabilities in addition to a
powerful local client*, which is at the same time low-cost (or free). There
seem to be a lot of solutions out there which do offer these capabilities
but they range from quite expensive to mega-expensive ($150 per user per
month is not that unusual). There are a number of free solutions, but they
are mainly for Linux (being developed to support Open Source projects, I
suppose this makes sense). Chief among these is Bugzilla (thanks to Stefan
for mentioning it), which can apparently be made to run on an NT/IIS server,
but frankly life is too short for all that messing around with text
configuraiton files and Perl scripts. Give me a setup.exe, point-and-click
installation, and a GUI server administration app. any day.

Regards

Blair

*TestTracker Pro has both a web-browser client and its main windows client
communicates with the server over TCP/IP and which can therefore be used
over the internet as well. In fact although the browser-based client is
pretty good as these things go, it suffers the usual problem of most
weblications in that the interface reminds me of a "terminal" (its not very
rich), and all the server round tripping makes it a bit slow/clunky to use.
The Windows client, on the other hand, offers the full functionality either
locally or remotely, and the performance (over ADSL anyway) is good.
Actually I'd rather use the non-browser based client-server style of
application any day, unless I was on a borrowed machine and didn't want to
install the client, or I wanted to allow customers to use it directly
without requiring them to install anything.