I’m always looking for ways to make things more efficient.
At the moment the way we handle development internally is not as efficient as it should be. It’s also quite hard to track “issues”.
So what I’m trying to find is some kind of software solution that allows us to do all that (and more) efficiently.
The kind of scenario we’re dealing with is a bit like this:
Staff requests > Developers
Client requests > Staff
Management > Developers
Management / Staff / Developers > 3rd party vendor
That may not be particularly clear …
Say there’s an application that our staff use internally and they want to either give feedback on an existing feature or request a new one.
Other applications / interfaces are customer facing and again, being able to get feedback and track it properly would be very beneficial.
At the moment someone (be they staff or a client) may make a feature request or submit feedback. It isn’t easy to track the progress of it and it’s impossible to show the user what’s going on with their request.
Ideally the software would allow us to have internal and external projects and expose the bugs / issues for certain ones, but with a reasonable level of control. For example, if there was a security bug you wouldn’t want to publicise it until you’d had a chance to deal with it etc., etc.
Another facet which is very important is triage / management. If you’ve got a finite number of developers working for you then you need to prioritise their workload.
Software that I’ve come across to date include solutions like Fog Bugz. There are two problems with Fog Bugz:
- audience – it seems to be aimed at the hardcore geek primarily. While that would work fine for our more technical staff and possibly even some of our technical users, it wouldn’t work for either our non-technical staff nor our non-technical users
- costs – while I appreciate that you need to pay for things, the problem is that we don’t have unlimited funds (who does?).
Hosted vs Outsourced?
I’d prefer to be able to host the solution “inhouse”, though I would be open to use some form of SAAS.
Technology?
If it’s “inhouse” then it needs to be using some form of LAMP. No Java or Ruby on Rails please.
So if anyone has any suggestions or recommendations please please share them
Update: Thanks for all the comments. Unfortunately a few of them got trapped by MT’s spam filters, but they’re all published below now.
Have a look at http://sifterapp.com/ – may not do all you want but it’s pretty and non-geeky
Michele,
We have been using Fogbugz now for quite a while both internally and externally and can highly recommend the investment. Yes it is expensive but have found nothing which comes closes in terms of usability and features. The latest release (v7) is a huge step forward as well with workflow plugins and a smoother UI.
As with all these things however they are just tools to help manage – all the management still remains however!
If you’d like to talk through our experience feel free to contact me.
Joseph
Hi Michele,
It sounds like you’re looking for a combined trouble ticketing and bug tracking system. There are lots of commercial and open source packages out there but you’ll probably find each one is a little too much of one or the other (bug tracking or trouble ticketing) and you’ll have to make compromises to use something as both.
I’ve used Bugzilla a lot in the past and am currently using JIRA a lot. These are both squarely aimed at developers (if you think Fogbugz is for hardcore nerds, I’d say bugzilla won’t get out of the traps). I looked at Fogbugz a few years ago as part of evaluating a bunch of bug tracking systems. I’m a big fan of open source but Fogbugz got my vote for a commercial system. It had lots of nicely though out features and nicely integrated email exchanges with the bug/ticket history.
If I had money to spend, personally I’d probably go with Fogbugz (unless it has become dramatically more complicated to use since I last looked at it).
If I wanted to keep costs to a minimum, I’d go with bugzilla. It is a bit ugly (although recent versions have been working on improving the interface) but it is well thought out and includes most of the functionality you’ll require. Having used JIRA for a few months I’m not sure I can recommend it. It seems to have captured hearts and minds of people like the Apache project (probably because open source projects can use it for free afaik) but its seems to be unnneccesarily complicated for what it is doing. It fails on your requirement to not require Tomcat also.
My two cents. Let us know what you settle on.
-stephen
At Ascio we used to use Jira (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) which is very good, but requires Tomcat.
Francesco
A couple of people have mentioned it, but if we’re going to run it inhouse I’d rather avoid Tomcat if at all possible. If we go down the SAAS route it won’t matter – obviously!
Michele
Excluding RoR excludes the excellent Redmine. Works where most LAMP solutions work.
Hi Michele,
We use trac for internal tickets/bugs (hosted by wush.net) and we use zendesk.com for external customer support. As they are both web apps we can cross link zendesk tickets to trac tickets and vice-versa.
Trac is keen and mean for the developers and zendesk does a great job of tracking email conversations. Zendesk also nods towards the ITIL support model, which I like personally.
Joe.
Joe
We looked at Zendesk – it’s seriously overpriced. Fine if you only have 1 member of staff, but we’d be paying a several thousand a month for it with the number of staff we have
Trac – looked at it, but from what I recall it was missing several features that we needed
Michele