Dear IT gods.

I've been tasked with trying to find a free / open source bug-tracking system / tool. It's mainly to follow bugs of a system I'm installing that's a cross of software and hardware design, and I'd like to be able to follow bug resolution during testing phases.

I know there are loads of proprietary systems which cost money and can be very well suited, but take a long time to setup.

Does anyone know or even better have experience of such stuff?

TIA

Obviously you have bugzilla which could be overkill

Jitterbug is quite nice and not too complicated either I've used it before.

JitterBug - Free Software Directory - Free Software Foundation

Cheers Mark.

Wiki has a very extensive list of bug-tracking software :eek:

But as I've never done this stuff before, it's a bit daunting. I reckon I'm still not sure whether the scope it will be used for will warrant a proper server / client setup. Maybe I'd be better just knocking up an access database or something around mysql...

You mean a defect logging and resolution system? If so, I've seen databases and spreadsheets used with up to tens of thousands of records.

The main issues to watch are that defect numbers are unique, date fields use a consistent underlying format, and that Name fields (raised by, action by, closed by type data) always use the same value for the same entity. For example, you'd want me to always be "Ken O'Neill", rather than sometimes that, and sometimes "Ken O'Neal", or "Kenny O'Neil", or "Kenneth O'Niall"...

Also, ideally (to please the project manager ), it would be nice to have some kind of automatic reporting / progress graphcs or whatever.

The issue we have is that there's a long list of issues, and I just need to devise a way of keeping track of it all. Up till now, we've used a spreadsheet, but it's getting overly large and cumbersome to manage, hence a more databasey kind of approach

A database can do raised / closed between dates, sorted and sub-sectioned by raised, action, closed by type reports, and most of them have a facility to import from spreadsheets. The worst part is coding the reports if you don't have a good report generator.

Been there, done that... It was my first proper job after leaving college.

Xavier,

Do you use any sort of SCM? SVN, GIt?

Well either way checkout Lighthouse: Simple hosted Issue tracking, bug tracking, and project management software.

It's a targeted hosted application that does just what you asked for, milestones, status settings and it's already set up...it has some integration to scm tools so you can do a commit and it will progress the ticket etc.

Thanks Colin.

To give you an idea. At the moment, I only need to track one project.

Currently, has around 500 bugs individually listed.

We would probably have 20-30 people submitting reports/feedback/progress, ranging from engineers, developers and customer-facing project management team.

It's all private / confidential. Cannot be made public and cannot afford to be listed in the public domain.

Milestone management / commital dates for fix, etc sound good. Ability to upload screenshots and other data sets would be required too.

Users would be inputting from Europe, Asia and possible US, so thinking about it, an internet-based system would be better purely from an access point of view. An "internal server" would also be possible, provided we can export data to make it available to customer on the outside.

I'd seriously give Jitterbug a go then as you can track thinks etc. Not sure how much reporting is in there these days but it is web based.