Ask HN: Best issue tracker in 2015? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best issue tracker in 2015?

9 pointsgsmethells11 comments

What do the people of Hacker News use as their issue tracker out there in 2015? We run Bugzilla, but I find its UI lacking. The UX is clunky. It does not integrate well with GitLab. Now that it has been 4.5 years since the Make Bugzilla Pretty contest happened and failed to affect change, even in Bugzilla 5.0, I feel it may be time to switch and I'd love to know what you use in your daily development life. If it has a good kanban experience, then all the better!

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Honestly, as something of a minimalist, I've been happiest with Github's issue tracker lately. GitLab's looks similar in screenshots, but I've not used GitLab. (Github also has an Enterprise version if you need on-premises install these days.)

It has just enough features to get the work done but also not feature/configuration overload so that it's also not eating a lot of "management time from you". Github in particular you can tell that Github themselves dogfood their issues and PRs and want them to be great products for themselves.

There are actually more than one "Kanban overlays" for Github issues I've seen. The first example to my mind is https://waffle.io/

I would presume if GitLab has similar APIs for their issues there may be a Kanban overlay for it as well.

If you are already using GitLab then maybe you should just use GitLab's issue tracker? I think the convenience of using your source control host as your issue tracker is a big, useful deal. (#synergy)

It took me a bit of "Selling" to management to begin to use Github issues as a solution at a number of organizations but every time I have it has been a rousing success! Most of the concerns around using issues have been that there "aren't enough fields for all the things we want to track on an issue." After a bit of discussion it is usually decided that they should try to track without so many fields and see what happens.

Ultimately, people love the simplicity and the integration with the repository. I know for a fact that GitLab's has a very similar mechanism and works wonderfully. Good suggestion and a very successful one!

Issue tracking is one of those areas in computing where there's a compulsion to over-organize things and store a lot of peripheral information that may or may not be germane to the actual problem of issue tracking. It's fascinating how much applying the YAGNI [You Aren't Going to Need It] principle to Issue Tracking reveals. A lot of fields are either to duplicate stuff that should already be searchable (in the main body, for instance) in a good issue tracker [1]. A bunch of other fields are business process related and it's not surprising how many of those business processes themselves could use a good YAGNI refactor, and the few that remain after tree-shaking are often easy enough to store in a label, a "tag" in the title of an issue, or a status on a kanban board.

[1] I honestly think that a lot of blame goes back to the very slow search of early issues trackers (including and especially, but not alone, Bugzilla) and needing to lump things into specialized fields to get any sort of search improvements.

Yet once again I recently have made decision to use mantis bug tracker. At a first glance it does not look too sexy but it is matured and have all functionalities I need.

Ha, I wanted to say Mantis!

I have used that to track stories/tickets/bugs for almost 15 years and it's my favorite. I love how the colors let me see at a glance what is most pressing. I find non-technical clients can use it without problems.

One thing a lot of modern systems suffer from in my opinion (Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Asana, Agile Zen), is that the space to leave a comment is about 2 inches by 1 inch. Who wants to communicate via that? I find that they work well at the top level of defining cards, but within a card I think their UI psychologically discourages communication, so people resort to email and other things. With Mantis I've always felt less friction getting people to keep the communication inside the issue tracker. When you consider that, I'm not surprised that people are saying they like Github Issues. It's one of the few systems where you don't feel like you're peering through a microscope.

In addition I can add that there is an interesting project called "mantis kanban" - look for their project here: https://github.com/cgaspard/mantiskanban

And check the demo here: http://mantiskanban.com/mantisbt/mantiskanban/

This made mantis look very impressive - and even my friend who loves those visual tweaks said he won't use trello anymore having mantis with mantiskanban.

1) Can it be hosted by someone else / SaaS? or must you host it yourself? (regulatory / contract / funding constraints sometimes dictate one or the other)

2) What's your budget?

3) How many people involved, and what are their jobs? All programmers? Designers? QA? Marketing? Support? Do customers get direct access to the issue tracker?

4) Is it really supposed to function as an issue tracker? or as a CRM system?

For "technical people only, non crm, cheap, potentially hosted at home" I still recommend Trac; If it's large scale company wide, JIRA is a good option (though it costs).

Haven't used SaaS solutions.

GitLab itself has its own issue tracker - what's wrong with that?

TBH the only trackers I've recently interacted with are github, bugs.debian.org and launchpad. I used to manage (and use) a few trac instances. Trac is more of a framework for making a project manager than a ready-made tracker - I'd have a look at:

http://www.agilofortrac.com/

Or maybe:

http://bloodhound.apache.org/

If you want a more out-of-the-box opinionated tracker than standard trac. Have you looked at phabricator?

I liked using Jira at my last job.

Phabricator's Maniphest, especially if you need custom fields and advanced sorting, and a relatively good looking gui.

Jira.

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