Ticketing system wanted.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Continuing the discussion from Other devs change my code, break behaviour and I'm asked to fix "bugs":

    @Ascendant said:

    Oh btw, what bug tracking system would you recommend that's dead easy to setup and use with all GUI goodies?
    I might as well introduce this myself.

    We've used (in order of introduction):

    Trac got ditched in favour of (first) FP, than (in parallel - still is!) Jira. I would highly NOT recommend the last two. Give Trac a go?

    Or see what other people suggest...



  • Trac looks most promising since I don't think any of my bosses would be willing to pay for something they have never heard of nor felt needed.

    I think I can use the trial versions of the other two to see what an issue tracking system even does, since I have never been lucky enough to use one before.
    Then I can set up Trac on my local machine and fumble with it a bit more for fun 😃

    Modified BSD License? So, I can use this at work for commercial purposes for free?

    And thank you very much @PJH for this thread 😄


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ascendant said:

    Modified BSD License? So, I can use this at work for commercial purposes for free?

    Given that the licence deals with redistribution, which I don't think you'll be doing, I don't think it's that relevant.

    Usage (in a work environment or personal) is free. In fact I don't think Edgewall Software offer any paid packages.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Others (free) I've used briefly:

    • Bugzilla - used on Mozilla projects
    • MantisBT - wasn't impressed with this one.

    And there's a whole list of others over at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_systems



  • Footprints is the WORST.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    What? Nobody wants to link Discourse? 🚎


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Take a look at www.OpenProject.org. It can be a real bastard to get going, but we liked a lot of what we saw feature wise.

    Of course, it is Rails and is a fork of Redmine, if you want to discount it for either if those reasons.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    Rails

    How about GitHub.com?



  • Or if you're a Microsoft shop: TFS? The 'work item' part has really improved since TFS 2010.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @PJH said:

    Bugzilla

    😷

    BTW: I don't know why people hate Jira so much. It's quite OK IMO.



  • +1 on JIRA. I've dealt with it as an end user (to look at Minecraft bugs) and I was pleasantly surprised by how it works.


  • area_deu

    We rolled our own years ago and now sell it to customers that have grown to hate bloated monstrosities like Remedy and JIRA.
    As always, it depends on what you need. Solutions that try to be the super-flexible configurable extensible one-stop-and-the-kitchen-sink-thing get ugly really fast.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    Not much help here but avoid HP products like the 👏



  • Agreed. HP's bugtracker as well as their help desk software is awful.



  • I want to add Launchpad to the list. Hosted service is $250/year, but you can get the code and run it yourself.

    I've never used it other than to comment about bugs in FOSS projects, but it seems OK.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @PJH said:

    Trac got ditched in favour of (first) FP, than (in parallel - still is!) Jira. I would highly NOT recommend the last two.

    I quite like Jira. I've heard other people's reasons about why they don't like it (and haven't experienced their pain) but I'm interested to hear why you don't recommend it.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    I'm interested to hear why you don't recommend it.

    It's slow and JS heavy. And it's one of the two timekeeping packages used by the company (the other is described in The Lounge here,) and filling it out is tedious, even with this add-on/widget/gadget or whatever they're called:

    The UI for that is

    • click a cell
    • enter 3h 45 format in the popup
    • press enter

    If I didn't have that, every cell would have to be tediously entered against whichever ticket the row relates to, and go through a numerous step task to enter (what appears there as) each single cell.

    1. locate ticket
    • More > Log Work
    • 3h 45 format in time
    • use the calendar widget to locate the date. Double points if it was last month. Alternatively hand-type the date wrongly.

    November was even worse:

    And the numbers on there, while more accurate than the "must add up to 37.5 hrs per week" bollocks we had a few years back, still omits a lot of "quick email here and there" and the odd hour or three spent doing work stuff in the pub.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @PJH said:

    It's slow and JS heavy.

    Definitely JS heavy. We're currently using v6.3.11. Aside from corporate network issues, though, I've never thought it to be slow, though that was basically the complaint someone else had.

    @PJH said:

    And it's one of the two timekeeping packages used by the company

    Oh, yeah, I remember your WTFs about that. I guess technically I have two as well, though the Jira work log is really for the customer's benefit so they can be assured that I'm actually doing something. The other system is much less finely grained for what I currently do (pretty much everything goes into a single line, with one entry per day).

    @PJH said:

    locate ticket
    More > Log Work

    3h 45 format in time
    use the calendar widget to locate the date. Double points if it was last month. Alternatively hand-type the date wrongly.

    Yes, I'm very familiar with this, though I tend to have the ticket I'm working on up in a browser and I log my time at the end of the day or when I finish working on it. I know a lot of people haven't been bothering with that, though, and then they have to go back and put stuff in at the end of the quarter (we have to report the figures quarterly). They're stupid.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @PJH said:

    JS heavy.

    Yeah, but I don't think that's a reason against it. I like its UI and the fact that it doesn't refresh the page after every action.

    @PJH said:

    timekeeping packages

    Ok, If you use JIRA for timekeeping, then I know why you hate it.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    Yes, I'm very familiar with this, though I tend to have the ticket I'm working on up in a browser and I log my time at the end of the day or when I finish working on it.

    The fact that we have 2 systems means I need something that will capture the information required on both. Neither of the current systems do (Netsuite books to nearest ¼hr, and has general categories of work, JIRA doesn't have those categories, but per-ticket stuff) so I have a third which captures everything, and do and export and a couple of pivot tables then fill out Netsuite and JIRA.

    Which is why (for me) Netsuite gets done once a week, and JIRA once a month. Ish.



  • @PJH said:

    And the numbers on there, while more accurate than the "must add up to 37.5 hrs per week" bollocks we had a few years back, still omits a lot of "quick email here and there" and the odd hour or three spent doing work stuff in the pub.

    That's your problem.

    We don't use it to log work.

    Must add up to sounds like a business decision, not a software problem.



  • @PJH said:

    then fill out Netsuite and JIRA.

    You do realize that JIRA has an API?

    I tested the idea out and had a program that logged in and scraped info from it.

    Editing might be more difficult... but... didn't get that far.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @xaade said:

    You do realize that JIRA has an API?

    "We'll look into it" was the response when Netsuite was mooted and we complained about still having to fill out two time sheets (after it was pointed out they were wrong to vociferously deny that we had to fill out two that is.)

    When they'll get round to doing it is another matter...

    OTOH, if you're suggesting I bother poking around myself in there to get it to do what I currently use Kimai for - that sounds like work.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @ben_lubar said:

    How about GitHub.com?

    How about it?



  • I'm ok with JIRA, it has a lot of warts, but it's better than most I've used.

    It sometimes draws wizards which don't have anything relevant for a step, but it shows that step to the user anyway with some retarded message like, "You don't need to do anything. Hit Next."

    The text boxes don't accept "Markdown" tags they claim to accept. You're supposed to be able to enter monospace like: {{monospaced text}}, from my experience that never works, possibly isn't even implemented except in the little help file that says you can do it.

    The Kanban and Agile board add-ons were purchased from another company, so they're badly integrated.

    Sorting by version number is-- well broken maybe not, but certainly dumb-- it doesn't attempt to parse the version number in any way, it just sorts by the order they appear in the list of versions. So you have to manually sort them, basically.

    Oh it does the dumb Discourse date hiding bullshit. "1 day ago". I had a little mini-rant to our IT people saying they need to figure out how to fix this, because when we're in crunch time doing our bugs for UAT (user acceptance testing), we need to know when that comment was made TO THE MILLISECOND. (Yes you can mouse-over to get the real time, but it's a fucking pain.) That's still not fixed on our instance; not sure if JIRA even allows you to change that.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    The Kanban and Agile board add-ons were purchased from another company, so they're badly integrated.

    Really? They seem OK to me.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Oh it does the dumb Discourse date hiding bullshit. "1 day ago".

    Yes, I hate that.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Really? They seem OK to me.

    They were brought in-house quite awhile ago, so they've been getting better and better. I dunno, they definitely are better now than they were a few years ago. Still slower than shit, though.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @blakeyrat said:

    the dumb Discourse date hiding bullshit.

    NO_REPRO:

    Perhaps you need to downgrade? We are



  • Atlassian JIRA Project Management Software (v6.4.1#64016-sha1:5d75814)

    You're ancient.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @blakeyrat said:

    You're company is ancient.

    sigh I know. We only just recently got rid of MKS Integrity for our source control (due to unwillingness to pay the increased extended support costs or something).


  • Dupa

    @anonymous234 said:

    but you can get the code and run it yourself.

    AFAIK you can't, really.

    Yeah, you can try but you shouldn't:

    That's FLOSS for you.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @kt_ said:

    https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+faq/920

    you'd have to reinvent those

    :shudders: Definitely intentional there...


  • Dupa

    @Tsaukpaetra said:

    :shudders: Definitely intentional there...

    Yup. Plus, you'd have to write your own data migration scripts.

    And they say that the software is "under active developments" and that changes are being made "on monthly basis", so you'd have to create those quite often.

    Yeah, they don't want you to. Fuck you, it's theirs.



  • Personally I prefer to see relative time if the event has happened less than 24 hours ago, after that I like to see absolute time instead.
    @blakeyrat said:

    Oh it does the dumb Discourse date hiding bullshit. "1 day ago". I had a little mini-rant to our IT people saying they need to figure out how to fix this, because when we're in crunch time doing our bugs for UAT (user acceptance testing), we need to know when that comment was made TO THE MILLISECOND. (Yes you can mouse-over to get the real time, but it's a fucking pain.) That's still not fixed on our instance; not sure if JIRA even allows you to change that.

    Just curious, but why is it so important to know to such detail when a comment was made? Aren't they shown in chronological order?



  • When I was looking around for one that didn't look so terrible I chose http://www.thebuggenie.com

    I didn't eventually get to spend much time with it and I see that it's now gone commercial.



  • @kt_ said:

    That's FLOSS for you.

    That's not FLOSS, that's pretend-FLOSS. Cannonical wants people to pay them moneyz for hosting and the only reason they published the code is to get some poor suckers to do their job for them.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The text boxes don't accept "Markdown" tags they claim to accept. You're supposed to be able to enter monospace like: {{monospaced text}}, from my experience that never works, possibly isn't even implemented except in the little help file that says you can do it.

    Works fine on our JIRA. IIRC there is a setting you have to enable for custom fields.


  • Dupa

    @Deadfast said:

    the only reason they published the code is to get some poor suckers to do their job for them.

    You're lying! 🚎

    No one will do any job for them -- no one is gonna use it. They only released it because they have, I mean -- they're Cannonical, they have to make software FLOSS.

    But

    So the answer is "Yes, you can run your own instance"... but please be aware of the risks and the lack of support before doing so. We don't recommend it; we'd much rather have you using this Launchpad instance and contributing to its improvement.

  • ♿ (Parody)

    @AlexMedia said:

    Just curious, but why is it so important to know to such detail when a comment was made? Aren't they shown in chronological order?

    I'm often interested in time stamps. It may help me look something else up, like in a log.



  • @kt_ said:

    Yeah, you can try but you shouldn't:

    That's FLOSS for you.

    Jesus, they don't put their data migration scripts in the repo? That's not even open source at all, that's more like "being a huge dick to people interested in our product".

    @AlexMedia said:

    Personally I prefer to see relative time if the event has happened less than 24 hours ago, after that I like to see absolute time instead.

    For me, it's literally the exact opposite.

    "Ok, 1212 went in 5 hours ago, but we just found it requires a tweak to 1216." "Well 1216 went in 'today' also." "What does that mean? Do we need to tweak 1216 or is the branch closed and we need to make a new JIRA?" "I can't tell! It just says 'today'!"

    Stuff over about 3 days old goes into "who cares about specifically when this happened" territory.

    @AlexMedia said:

    Just curious, but why is it so important to know to such detail when a comment was made? Aren't they shown in chronological order?

    Usually we have 2, 3, 4, or more tickets that all lean on each other. Front End people need to know when Back End work is done, and whether it's merged. Quality Assurance people need to know when Front End people are done, and also have their own tickets they need to update when they're doing a full regression pass, etc.

    Within a single ticket, there's no issue.

    @Deadfast said:

    Works fine on our JIRA. IIRC there is a setting you have to enable for custom fields.

    On our JIRA it shows up in the help file but doesn't actually work. That's a bug either way you look at it: if we don't have that setting enabled, then it shouldn't show up on the help link I clicked from that field.

    @boomzilla said:

    I'm often interested in time stamps. It may help me look something else up, like in a log.

    That too. "Did we see this occur after the ticket was closed?" Hard to answer if you don't know exactly when it closed.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Usually we have 2, 3, 4, or more tickets that all lean on each other. Front End people need to know when Back End work is done, and whether it's merged. Quality Assurance people need to know when Front End people are done, and also have their own tickets they need to update when they're doing a full regression pass, etc.

    Within a single ticket, there's no issue.

    Got it, thanks :)



  • Code in Github? Built in ticketing.

    But TFS is actually not super terrible if you skip the source control part and just use the work management piece with a nice little web-based kanban board and everything.



  • @PJH said:

    And the numbers on there, while more accurate than the "must add up to 37.5 hrs per week" bollocks we had a few years back, still omits a lot of "quick email here and there" and the odd hour or three spent doing work stuff in the pub.

    37.5? Lucky you! I love PM's where every worked hour must tie to a project work item. Of course, going to the head is thus added to every estimate for each item in the MS project crap. Oh and be sure to estimate everything out for the next 8 months. Without any requirements.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @NTW said:

    every worked hour must tie to a project work item

    :wtf:



  • @asdf said:

    :wtf:

    The gulf between most PMO's and reality is larger than the grand canyon.



  • I use jira at work and youtrack at home.



  • And no one said JIRA Jr. I r dissapoint.


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