Issue-tracking systems for Agile development

Learn from experience...

I manage a small team of 3 developers, who also work alongside 2 designers and finding a decent project/issue tracking tool to help us collaborate has been is very difficult.

One of the things I'm keenly aware of is flexibility and scope for growth, as a relatively new company we're only just looking into these issues, alongside documentation and SCM etc, any software we chose to use will form the foundation of how we work.

I had 3 basic requirements:

Bug Tracking

Wiki

SCM

I've looked at 99% of the systems shown here and found none of them to be suitable, thats not to say they're bad, they just didn't fit the above criteria or were difficult to configure.

In the end we settled for Sourceforge Enterprise, you can configure it all yourself, or download it as a VMWare image that runs straight out of the box, there are other similar systems such as GForge, and Jira - I would stress that these are commercial products, but both Sourceforge and GForge of a free 15 user license (which is great for small development departments).

Some more article in the article?

Hi,

I use Trac quite a bit at work and have even developed some plugins for it to make it more suitable for Agile development.

So I was quite interested when I way the Title and byline of this article.

I'm a little disappointed however that the article can be summarised as: "I'm moving back to PHP dev. I needed an issue tracker. I chose Trac, but here are some others."

There is no discussion of the merits of Trac or how it can effectively and easily integrate into SVN commit messages for example.

There is no discussion about how to configure the ticket system to best suit your needs (everyone is different but it's interesting to see how other people use the framework provided!).

When throwing phrases like Agile development around, it's odd that you do not mention some third party plugins that try to extend Trac to cater better for Agile development such as Timing And Estimation Plugin, Scrum Burndown Plugin and my own project Worklog Plugin. All of these are available on the great website Trac Hacks which you also failed to mention (although this could be due to a prolonged system outage with Trac Hacks servers which should be resolved by the end of the week according to the chatter on IRC - for now you can use a slightly older mirror at https://trachacks.coderanger.net/wiki/TitleIndex until http://www.trac-hacks.org/ is back up and running)

Hopefully you will follow up this article with some more practical thoughts after you have used Trac for a little while.

Cheers

Col

(coling on #trac IRC and on trac-hacks.org)

Trac needs a major overhaul

I appreciate Trac has a large and loyal following, but I've got to say - it sucks.. its un-useable.. for newbies.

Col, I look at those links and its impossible to decipher exactly where to start with Trac, there is no comprehensive, easy to follow list of extensions.

What about Agile Project Management tools?

Why would you want to limit yourself to a bug tracking tool? I was surprised not to see any of the Agile PM tools I am familiar with on this list, such as VersionOne, Rally, Scrumworks, Mingle, TargetProcess, to name a few. These are commercial products but most offer a free option for small teams. They also provide support for end to end agile project management, as opposed to just keeping a bug list.

What about bugzilla?

Whoa, I'm surprised Mozilla's gem was not mentioned...

http://www.bugzilla.org/

Couple it with a sound development/testing procedure, and you're good to go!

More about BugTracker.NET

Warning. This is an infomerical, because I'm the author of BugTracker.NET.

I think BugTracker.NET is "Agile" in that it's very fast to setup and can be very lightweight to use, if you prefer to use it that way. When you first install it, no required fields, no permissions, no projects - just start entering items, and all you need is a one line short description. BugTracker.NET has the heavier weight stuff if you need it, but doesn't force you to have to use it that way.

I wrote it when I worked at a small company and we the team of just 3 developers needed our own tool It was the tool that we developers wanted. I didn't create it hands-off managers, to feed an MS Project Gant chart.

Here's a page of quotes I've harvested from the web about what others say about BugTracker.NET, and you'll see that the idea of simplicity keeps coming up in the comments:

http://www.ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet_others_say.html

Ok, end of infomercial.