Wednesday, February 7, 2007

What tool to pick for bug tracking?(fogbugz vs trac vs jira vs bugzilla)

Hi,

Recently i analyzed some of the bug trackers available on the market and had to make a short report for our management with the features of the applications most suitable for our company.Following is the report i presented, and since i did not got anything like this on the web i thought to post it. Maybe will be useful for someone will need to do the same job.The applications are ordered based on our company internal votes.Please note that i did not intended to list all the features an application has, but only the most important for our company.So if you consider that i skipped one important feature or even an important application be free to update the list.
We have fogbugz vs trac vs jira vs bugzilla
All trackers:
  • have possibility of creating projects and assign users to the projects and setting visibility&modifying rights
  • allow adding of a bug trough an web interface and assign a user to it
  • allow setting milestones/releases
  • allow linking one bug to another if they are related or duplicated
  • have integration with subversion and CVS - have RSS and email notification


1)fogbugz has:

  • discussion forum
  • two way email: A message arrives in a mailbox on your mail server. Periodically, FogBugz uses the POP3 protocol to check your mail server for new messages. If any messages are found, FogBugz downloads them from the mail server and creates a case out of each one. If you're using the AutoSort feature, FogBugz discards spam and sorts the rest of the messages into areas according to topic. If desired, FogBugz sends an immediate reply to the customer, providing them with a URL they can use to check on the status of their request. Once the message is in FogBugz, you can treat it like any other case: you can prioritize it, assign it, track it, slice it, dice it, deep fry it, etc. At any time you can reply to the message from within FogBugz. FogBugz will insert the case number into the subject line of the outgoing message. If the customer responds to your reply, as long as they don't remove the FogBugz case number from the subject, their response will be appended to the current case rather than opening a new case. FogBugz will keep a complete transcript of everything that happens with the case, including all relevant incoming and outgoing email and even private internal conversations about the case which the customer does not see.
  • screenshot tool (captures a screenshot with one mouse click and submits it to FogBugz with another. You can even highlight a part of the screenshot to indicate what you think is wrong. )
  • very simplistic and without constrains web interface (There are no required fields in a case) a way to add crash reporting and user feedback dialogs to your own application
    drawback: - if you want to see all emails sent by a customer you have to do a global search with user domain something like: @clientDomain.com

feeling: The UI looks very good


2)Trac has:

  • built-in wiki engine, used for text and documentation throughout the system. WikiFormatting is used in wiki pages, tickets and check-in log messages. This allows for formatted text and hyperlinks in and between all Trac modules.
  • Trac timeline - provides a historic view of the project in a single report.It lists all Trac events that have occurred in chronological order, a brief description of each event and if applicable, the person responsible for the change The timeline lists these kinds of events: Wiki page events, Creation and changes Ticket events like creation and resolution/closing (and optionally other changes), Source code changes, Repository check-ins, Milestone completed
  • TracBrowser - Browsing source code with Trac., Viewing changes to source code.,Viewing change history .
  • it's open sources

feeling: The UI looks very good


3)jira has:

  • Control the issue creation process you can have absolute control over: what users can do and which users can do it issue types (e.g. bug, task, requirement), issue fields - as many as you like how issue workflow maps to your business processes ...all of which can be configured on a global or project-specific level.
  • Create/update issues via email but you have to answer from your personal email account to the client and fw the answer to the jira for logging it in the bug case.
  • Generic Reporting (a table-based view, and several graphical views)
  • Customizable dashboard: Your 'dashboard' is your JIRA homepage. Completely configurable, it presents your chosen information immediately upon login. A user's dashboard is made up of any combination of configurable portlets, such as: a list of issues assigned to you a list of your saved filters project statistics filter statistics project list line graphs pie charts HTML text messages
  • And if you also buy the Confluence product you get a wiki which can be structured in spaces for each project. In Confluence each space publishes its own news. This allows you to share time-based content, such as news items for a project, announcements for your team, or a personal journal. It supports threading so you can turn any page into a team discussion forum Each page from here can be linked to a case in jira and the other way around.

feeling: UI heavy populated with info but in time you get used with it or you customize it.Other then that the UI looks very good.


4)bugzilla has:

  • Generic Reporting (a table-based view, and several graphical views)
  • Request System (allows you to flag certain bugs or bug attachments for review. Once flagged, the requested reviewer may approve or reject the flagged bug.)
  • allows users vote for bugs indicating that they'd like them fixed
  • allows Dependency Tree (you can see the dependency relationship from the bug as a tree structure)
  • it's open sources

feeling: Ugly UI

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

So which choice did you made ? I personaly prefer Trac because of its Wiki system. Does Jira also have such kind of addOn to write project independed documentations ?

Capon

Corey said...

BugTracker.NET is a free, open source issue tracker that has the same approach as FogBugz. (disclaimer: I'm the author). Same integration of incoming/outgoing email, screen capture utility, no required fields.

Mani Jain said...

I have found a recently launched tool "Projistics Bug Tracker"
Check the given link to get a detailed comparision amoung all candidate tools http://www.projistics.com/BugTracker_Compare.asp

Mona said...

I have tried Projistics. It is very user friendly and have almost all functionality as Fogbuzz and Jira. Infact it has few more. have a look at the comparison chart present in there website.
http://www.projistics.com/BugTracker_Compare.asp

Also, it is very cost effective for a small to medium sized organization.

Rohit Tripathi said...

I think

Projistics
is the best Bug tracking software .

buy wow gold said...

When Wow Gold wolf finally found the wow gold cheap hole in the chimney he crawled cheap wow gold down and KERSPLASH right into that kettle of water and that was cheapest wow gold the end of his troubles with the big bad wolf.
game4power.
The next day the Buy Wow Goldlittle pig invited hisbuy gold wow mother over . She said "You see it is just as mygamegoldI told you. The way to get along in the world is to do world of warcraft gold things as well as you can." Fortunately for that little pig, he buy cheap wow gold learned that lesson. And he just k4gold lived happily ever after!.