

Ask HN: Good, lightweight bug tracking system for small team? - dtran

Hey everyone,
My cofounder and I have been using a google doc + lots of dropbox documents to keep track of to-dos, feature roadmap, and bugs, but it's gotten to the point where we do need a real bug tracking system since our google doc spreadsheets are just a mess to sort through.<p>What's a good, lightweight bug tracking system for a small team (&#60; 5 people)? I've used Bugzilla in the past, but that seems to be overkill and it's definitely not lightweight. Trac seems to be decent although I haven't really used it for projects. Anyone have good experiences with Mantis?<p>Thanks
======
dtran
Overview of Small teams bug tracking software:

Unfuddle - Hosted solution, SVN/Git hosting + really clean bug tracking. Free
for 2 people, $9/mo for small teams. Has Mylyn support and a OS X dashboard
widget

Bugzilla - everyone seems to agree it's too heavy and I don't want to deal
with installing and configuring it

Trac - Pretty lightweight, good integration with SVN, and useful built-in
wiki, quick, simple installation

Speckle - To-do list with multiple checkboxes, made by HN's very own
elliotkember

Pivotal Tracker - hosted solution with drag n drop interface, allows you to
import a list of existing bugs in CSV format. I found the interface a little
clunky for my taste.

Others mentioned that I haven't checked out: Fogzbugz, Redmine, Lighthouse,
Flyspray, Purifyapp, Codebase

------
chappi42
+1 for redmine

We (~7 people) migrated away from trac and use redmine for several projects
with subversion and now git. Working very well since 3 years.

A friend of mine uses indefero and was happy with it. Link:
<http://www.indefero.net/open-source/>

------
raytheon
I recently started using redmine (<http://www.redmine.org>) and only had good
experiences with it. It's an open-source ruby on rails project management
"framework". It supports everything you are looking for, and then some more,
namely:

\- roadmap for upcoming versions/features \- dedicated site for documentation
\- wiki \- forum \- tickets \- repository support

The repository support let's you do things like refer to a ticket in a commit
message which then gets associated with said ticket (or even changes the
status of the ticket as soon as you commit the bugfix).

I could go on and on... but you get the point.

Here's a demo where you can give some of the things a try:

<http://demo.redmine.org/>

------
elliottkember
I've been building Speckle (<http://speckleapp.com>) for a little while: a to-
do list with multiple checkboxes per item. it's reasonably light-weight - I
don't know whether it suits what you're looking for, but Id be interested to
know what you think :)

Edit: epi0Bauqu beat me to it!

~~~
dtran
Reminds me a lot of doodle from the screenshot. Will check it out - maybe I'll
start using this instead of Google tasks for my own personal to-dos since that
usually is such a long list sitting on top of my google calendar that I can't
see my calendar -_-

~~~
elliottkember
I hadn't seen Doodle before - it's quite interesting! A similar layout, but a
different objective.

Maybe it's me, but I found it's quite hard to figure out what on earth Doodle
is based on its homepage. That's why I like having an in-action screenshot on
the homepage, and a "sign up with one click" button. Hopefully Speckle is a
little more obvious.

------
hlidotbe
We use Redmine here (~4 people) and it's great. Rails backed, lots of plugin
if you need more and easily extendable.

It integrate cleanly with CVS, Git, Mercurial, SVN, ... and we'll even do
invoicing with it in a few weeks.

There are paid hosting options if you don't want to maintain it yourself.

~~~
Zeleb0ba
Can you shed some light on Redmine's invoicing? I have not seen any plugins
that give that functionality.

~~~
hlidotbe
We use this one: <http://github.com/edavis10/redmine-invoice-plugin>. Simple
(a bit too simple) but gets the job done and can autofill based on timesheet
entries.

------
fpotter
Try Pivotal Tracker. It's more geared for todos / feature stuff (and does it
really well), but you can use it for bugs, too. If you're tracking more than
50 or so bugs, I could see wanting to use something else, though.

~~~
dtran
Thanks for the suggestion. I just had a funny experience - went there to
register... said that my email was already registered... turns out I made an
account on pivotal a while back but never used it haha. Will give it a shot.
Thanks!

~~~
dtran
Hmm I don't like the interface - drag and drop is kind of clunky for these
purposes

------
thomaspaine
Trac is great and plugs in really easily to SVN. It's at least worth playing
around with since so many open source projects use it.

I wrote a Django middleware that uses Trac's xmlrpc plugin to automatically
create Trac tickets for errors. I'm sure it's just as simple to do for
whatever you're using.

~~~
sidmitra
Redmine, is a good alternative.

~~~
sidmitra
Or try Unfuddle, which is sort of like hosted redmine. They have a freemium
model, free for 2 users, unlimited repos.

~~~
dtran
Wow I actually LOVE this hosted solution - minimal setup, easy to customize
(can create versions/comps/severities with minimal effort. What really puts it
over the top for me is the widget. I'm pretty sure that's going to 1.2x my
productivity in terms of knocking out bugs =)

------
blogimus
How lightweight are you talking? Are you looking for a hosted tool (like
fogbugz) or are you definitely going to manage/host it yourself?

I've been using Jira, and there's a $10 version for small groups.

Whatever you chose, make sure of one thing: every tracked bug or task has a
unique URL.

------
Jim_Neath
I'm currently working on a bug tracker (<http://purifyapp.com>). I can send
you a beta invite if you're interested? Also open to anyone else who fancies
trying it out.

Email me at jim@purifyapp.com

------
jacquesm
We use trac. And it works really well, has a built in wiki for other bits and
pieces that need remembering.

~~~
peter_severin
I work alone but I still use Trac and couldn't be effective without it. The
Wiki is excellent and I love the Subversion support and how you can cross-link
everything.

------
epi0Bauqu
I just started using <http://speckleapp.com/>

It's relatively new, very lightweight, and made by HN member elliottkember,
who is very open to feedback/suggestions.

------
nostrademons
Post-its on a whiteboard.

~~~
vog
Your advice is great, but it is too simple and too obvious to be used by any
modern team. It is old-fashioned, without any noise and hype around it.

Fortunately, the guys at <http://73primenumbers.com/> started a campaign to
add the missing buzz.

~~~
nostrademons
My tech lead from two projects ago used post-its on a whiteboard, and one of
the teams I work closely with still does. For search options, we used a
2D-grid, where the vertical axis was the component and the horizontal access
was the state of done-ness (unassigned, being worked on, in code review,
finished).

If you have a small, colocated team, this is basically ideal. There's low
overhead, and the overhead consists of physically taking off a post-it and
sticking it in the next column, which feels very satisfying. At a glance, you
can see how done the project is - lots of post-its on the left means you have
a while to go, lots of post-its on the right mean you're almost done. If you
have components that need lots more attention, they'll show up as stragglers
on the grid, and then you can either allocate more resources or cut the
feature as appropriate. (In our project, that was usually self-allocation,
because we didn't have particular engineers assigned to particular components,
and each engineer was familiar with a few different components). If a lot of
tasks get stuck in the code review stage, you know that it's time to lean on
the code reviewers a bit.

------
tophercyll
Our three man team recently took advantage of the FogBugz YC offer and gave it
a try. There were some things we liked about it, but in the end it felt too
heavy for us. It was more of a support ticketing system than an easy way for a
small team to track their bugs (although it would probably be good if you had
a lot of external users reporting bugs).

The other problem was that even a lot of custom tweaking, we never quite got
the email subsystem working the way we wanted. We finally started using a
plugin to make sure we all got emailed on every change, but then we got
swamped because we couldn't figure out how to make it send only one email if
you changed multiple fields on a ticket. It always wanted to send one for each
piece of data that changed.

Before that, we'd been using a Google Docs spreadsheet, doing pseudo-joel-
spreadsheet for project tracking and keeping a simple list of bugs.

Now we're using Wave and treating it as a digital whiteboard. It's got its
share of bugs still, but I've been really happy.

We've got one wave where we do project tracking (including moving little name
markers around, so we can all see real time what everyone is working on. And
we've got another wave for bugs with same rules.

We don't put nearly as much info in our wave as we used to put in the
spreadsheet (we did a lot of effort estimation and completion time tracking),
but the simplicity may actually be helping us keep on top of it better.

And it's awesome to collaboratively rework our goals for each release and at
any time we can just scroll through our bug list.

~~~
dtran
Hmm, I hadn't considering wave as a bug tracking system. Our google doc
spreadsheet was already too busy, so I can't imagine Wave making that any
better. Really interesting idea though - maybe useful to organize team
sprints/small projects.

~~~
tophercyll
Yeah, we definitely had to trim down how much info we were storing. Obviously
that was a sacrifice, but the upside was a lower barrier to entering a new
feature or bug. We really do just treat it like a digital whiteboard (even to
the point of posting pictures of our actual whiteboard until we can transcribe
them). And the realtime collaborative editing kills a traditional wiki.

------
grk
<http://www.codebasehq.com/features/tickets-milestones>

Codebase has a nice feature - you can modify tickets from your commit
messages.

------
megamark16
I'm currently working on a web app builder called AppRabbit
(<http://apprabbit.com>) and used it to create my bug/issue tracking system
for tracking my progress with...it. I'm still working on finishing up a few
fairly fundamental features, but you're welcome to try it out if you'd like a
beta invite. Shoot me an email if you (or anyone else) is interested in seeing
what it can do. admin@apprabbit.com.

------
scorpioxy
There's a difference between a bug tacker and an issue tracker.

Bugzilla works great as a bug tracker but is not a great issue tracker. Trac,
the opposite.

From what you described, seems you're looking more for an issue tracker or a
project planning sort of thing.

I've liked Redmine, though I haven't used it professionally yet.

~~~
huherto
Can you elaborate? What is the difference? Is it that an issue tracker is more
general than a bug tracker?

~~~
scorpioxy
Yes, it would be more general. Although an issue tracker can be used as a bug
tracker(look at Trac).

So typically, a bug tracker would be geared more towards programmers and
software bugs, while an issue tracker is usually more friendly towards non-
programmer users(so would include stuff like knowledge bases, wikis...).

In practice, the distinction is not as clear cut as the definition implies.

------
gouki
I'm also a Mantis user, and I'm quite happy with it.

Mantis supports Git and SVN integration, if you use the Source plugin. You can
find detailed information on how to add these functionalities to Mantis at the
following URL: [http://leetcode.net/blog/2009/01/integrating-git-svn-with-
ma...](http://leetcode.net/blog/2009/01/integrating-git-svn-with-mantisbt/)

Note: Importing repositories with a couple hundred commits will take a while!

I also like FlySpray, but unfortunately, the last commit seems to be 1 year
old.

------
AnneTheAgile
Based on posts here I found the "Task-focused API"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task-Focused_Interface> . There are lots of
extensions available based on it:
<http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn_Extensions> . For example, from
gmail, you can add a task by tagging a message! This Extensions page also
seems to be a good reference list of todo aka project management trackers.

------
middayc
For bugs <http://curecode.org/> is ery lightweight and fast. You can see it in
use here <http://curecode.org/rebol3/view-tickets.rsp> .

For sharable todo's I can "recommend" (my) <http://www.qwikitodo.com> , you
can even make "actionable" Plan/Todo meshes with it that have titles,
subtitles, free form mixing of text todo items, regular lists, etc...

------
kchtest
<http://www.getdonedone.com>

It's great for small teams where you don't need a ton of reporting features -
and it's focused on real-time responsiblity (who needs to respond to what
right now). Google docs/excel aren't efficient because there's too much extra
noise (sifting thru bugs that don't pertain to you, not easily seeing what
bugs are waiting on you with a question, etc.)

Hope you'll try us out!

-KC

------
andrewcooke
I haven't used it, but this is "interesting" - <http://www.fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki>

(I use Trac myself, and it's OK, but not wonderful - haven't found anything
better, but will be trying Redmine after reading comments here).

[edit: also, you can do bug tracking with Google code, which I am surprised
no-one else has mentioned]

~~~
andrewl
I want to dig into Fossil as well. And I'm impressed that SQLite moved to
Fossil in September 2009:

"Version 3.6.18 - Beginning with this release, the SQLite source code is
tracked and managed using the Fossil distributed configuration management
system. SQLite was previously versioned using CVS.
--<http://www.sqlite.org/news.html>

And this page on the design of Fossil is interesting:

[http://www.fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/theory1.wik...](http://www.fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/theory1.wiki)

------
1331
Flyspray is as advertised: "uncomplicated." If you want a simple system, it is
worth a try. <http://flyspray.org/>

~~~
CraigBuchek
+1 for FlySpray. It's PHP-based, and pretty easy to install and set up. It
does take a few minutes to set it up to add your desired Task Types (TODO,
Bug, Feature Request, etc.) and Categories. But once you've done that, it's
quite easy to use, and looks pretty good too.

------
shadow
Try Lighthouse, <http://lighthouseapp.com/> Been using it and it's great

~~~
texel
Agreed. Not only that, but they have an awesome API. I've used it to write
automation tools for our build/deploy process. Never underestimate the
usefulness of a good API.

------
ordinaryman
Why not build one..

* Within a few minutes,

* Online,

* Over Google App Engine and

* Without Python/Java coding.

Check out : [http://ifreetools.blogspot.com/2010/03/building-simple-
bug-t...](http://ifreetools.blogspot.com/2010/03/building-simple-bug-tracker-
application.html)

------
jbm
More of a project management tool, but I used thymer (thymer.stunf.com/) while
putting together a social network for dogs for a client. They would just mark
the bugs, I'd comment on it, and we'd have a point of reference for when we
talked together.

------
petervandijck
I like unfuddle.com

------
jacktang
Redmine and Trac

------
charliepark
You might check out Garret Dimon's <http://sifterapp.com>. I think it's what
37signals would make if they made bug-tracking software.

~~~
roam
I use Sifter and love the way it looks and works, but the lack of any kind of
API is starting to get on my nerves.

------
abovesun
Unfuddle is very good, very light and easy, it specially helpfull if you are
using Eclipse IDE, unfuddle has Mylyn connector to synchronize bugs with ide.

~~~
kareemm
+1 for Unfuddle. Has the simplest, most intuitive UI of any bug tracker that
I've used...

FogBugz is good, but almost certainly heavy for what you need.

Bugzilla's UI makes me want to claw my eyes out - pay the 9 bucks for an
interface that wasn't designed by a programmer.

Jira's probably on the heavier side for what you need, too.

------
bloonlabs
If your using git, try <http://wiki.github.com/schacon/ticgit/>

------
briancary
Mantis is great. Easy to install and use. Definitely go with that if you're on
PHP/MySQL. No need to fuddle with the rest.

------
sdutoit
Try roundup: <http://roundup.sourceforge.net/>

------
s3graham
If it's just bugs, I like the built-in google code or bitbucket ones just
fine.

------
keefe
mylyn makes bugzilla a lot easier to use if you use eclipse.

