

Small development teams, what are your biggest qualms with bug management tools? - kenrogers

Hey HN, I&#x27;m hoping to get the community&#x27;s opinion on currently available bug management&#x2F;issue tracking tools such as JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, etc. Are you happy with these tools? What are they missing that you would like to see? Or what do they do that you find annoying or unnecessary? I&#x27;m specifically looking for feedback from small and remote development teams. Thanks!
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Jemaclus
The biggest one for me is that bug management tools tend to be "another app"
that I have to deal with in addition to issue tracking (not necessarily bugs)
and task management (also not necessarily bugs), as well as potentially being
separate from code changes (i.e. matching commits to bug fixes or features).
The cognitive overhead is pretty high.

At my previous team, we largely used Github Issues to track everything. This
worked, for the most part, but it made tracking things that weren't code-
related iffy. For instance, designs for new features don't necessarily belong
in Github Issues, nor do feature requests, or non-code related tasks like
setting up a new server.

There's just only so much cognitive overhead we can have to track all of these
things, and adding Yet Another App for bug tracking is tricky.

That's just the first thing that pops into my head. Good luck. :)

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kenrogers
Hey thanks so much for your feedback. So if there was a SaaS tool designed for
development teams that cleanly and simply managed issue tracking and task
management, would that be something you would use? What would you need to make
switching to a tool like that worth it?

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Jemaclus
It would have to cleanly and simply manage all of the different needs that
small teams have: bug tracking, issue tracking, feature requests,
prioritization, code changes, etc.

My rule of thumb for switching to new tech is that the new app must be a 10x
improvement over the old app, whether that's 10x cheaper, 10x faster, 10x
features, or however I wanna measure it. If it's not that much better, then
the paperwork/training hassle isn't gonna be worth it for my team to switch.
One example is the Hipchat/Slack discussion. We used Hipchat before Slack was
a thing. Slack looks awesome. But is it 10x more awesome than Hipchat? I've
never been convinced, and it's just not worth the hassle of setting everyone
up with Slack accounts and software for the incremental improvement.

Right now, bug tracking is tedious but manageable. You need to make it 10x
easier, 10x cheaper, or 10x more features (or some smaller combination
thereof) in order for people to consider it a no-brainer to switch.

And to be honest, that's a tall order. You risk turning into a Salesforce-
esque nightmare where you're trying to do everything at once. If you could
somehow unify one or two of those things into one coherent, easy to use app (a
la Zenefits or Workday or ZenPayroll), then you'd be on the right track.

Good luck!

~~~
kenrogers
Thanks so much for all this feedback, you've been a huge help. Now I'm off to
do some brainstorming, sketching, prototyping, and asking more people more
questions :)

