

Ask HN: FogBugz vs. jira? - rmk

I am evaluating choices for a project management solution that can be used by a small team of around 10 people, and I have tried out jira, but I heard that FogBugz is also quite good.<p>Just wanted to hear your opinions / experience with FogBugz / jira / any other tool.<p>Some requirements:<p>* No SaaS (we will host it)
* Integration with svn (and git)
* Good user interface (I don't want to use Bugzilla / RT for this reason).
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briandoll
I've used both, and plenty of other tools. I really think these types of tools
need to be aligned with the type of team you have and the workflow you plan to
use. There are a dozen tools that will fit the bill on a feature breakdown.
With real-world use, with your team, with your project, with your environment,
you'll discover a clear winner.

Some notes on products I've used, for reference:

FogBugz: A few years ago it was reasonably lightweight and decent. It's gotten
more complicated over the years and I couldn't stand it the last time I
checked it out.

JIRA: The "enterprise" solution. Infinitely flexible, with all the positive
and negative aspects that go along with that. Best API of all of them, though,
IMHO.

Pivotal Tracker: I've used Pivotal several times over the years, and to be
honest the UI is very cumbersome to use IMHO, and the density of features make
it fairly heavyweight to use.

AgileZen: My personal all-time favorite for managing development projects.
Fits a kanban-inspired mould, which I tend to like quite a bit. JIRA offers a
kanban-board view as well, BTW.

If I were you, I'd sign up for free accounts for all of these and use them for
a week or so. It's the best way to find out if you like how the tool operates
and if your team will actually use it, which is more important than any
specific feature.

I'd also take a second look at your requirements. I wouldn't discount a SaaS
tool for no reason. SCM integration (svn, git) can sound nice, but to be
honest I've found that it adds too much friction to the commit workflow (to
add a story ID or whatever) and is usually of little value).

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bitdrift
At my last company, we used FogBugz for almost two years but started exploring
other systems the last few months I was there.

I initially chose FogBugz because I loved how easy it was to create a new
issue in the system (which at the time was significantly better than the
others I tried). It only requires a single line of text for the description.
There are additional fields you can use, but they are never required. That
said, FogBugz's UI hasn't quite kept up with the latest and greatest, so we
found it to be somewhat unsatisfying and even quite annoying at times (not
enough inline editing for example). Ultimately the reason we started exploring
other tools was because of its slow performance (although I'm not sure if it
was due to having it deployed on a Linux server rather than Windows).

We tested Jira with the GreenHopper plugin (agile development) for about a
month. Most of the team made the transition quite easily (a few guys wanted to
go back to FogBugz) and it was significantly faster than our FogBugz system--
which made the team much happier. For our planning meetings, we all really
liked the user story board view in GreenHopper, and overall I found the user
interface more usable than I expected. However, Jira definitely feels like a
typical old-school 'enterprisey' Java app that has been quickly updated to
stay current (not to mention the sprawling feature set it has accumulated over
the years). Its UI definitely lacks the cohesiveness of FogBugz (and
especially Pivotal Tracker).

In the end, our company was acquired by a company also using FogBugz, so the
team never had a chance to make a decision one way or the other.

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seltzered
I just spent a couple weeks comparing Jira, Bugzilla, Fogbugz, and Redmine.
I'm at multi-faceted design group doing firmware, desktop software, and
silicon design(multiple codebases / documentation), and I wanted a system that
will work for everyone, and let me move issues across projects to their root
cause. I also wanted it to have email-in support to make sure employees have
no excuse to not file an issue.

Fogbugz: likely my favorite from a user-interface standpoint. But I needed
project categories, something you can now write a plugin for, but didn't have
time to deal with. Their Kiln product looks great, but you may need to check
if it's svn/git compatible -- I think it's primarily mercurial.

Redmine: I would've chose this if it was a small group. It's free, open
source, lets you create compartmentalize into subprojects probably more than
you should. But I had fears of ruby scaling out to a bunch of people. There
were also some UI quirks that bugged me (e.g. global search should always be
enabled, even in a project), although there's some gorgeous themes coming out
for redmine soon.

JIRA: What I ultimately chose. It's definately a "wine of fear", that is an
enterprise product with many features thrown in not to offend or lose
business. Because of this, you get a fairly boring UI, and can feel bizarrely
complex to configure. That said, it works.

------
sp4rki
Have you tried/looked into Redmine (<http://www.redmine.org/>)? I've heard
it's quite good.

~~~
oscilloscope
Redmine's got a ton of core functionality. Wiki, forum, repository browser,
sub-projects, gantt charts-- a lot. Simple, straightforward interface with
occasional quirks.

I've found the plugins to be mostly non-functional. Figured I could quickly
mash together a CRM and real-time chat, but, alas this was not the case.

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adam-_-
I don't like either. Whiteboard please!

