I wish GitHub had a "This bug affects me" or +1 button so the comment history stays clean of "me too" responses.
This has been a huge frustration for me when it comes to bug tracking. I have multiple clients who just aren't technical people and when they see the wall of options that bugzilla and mantis offer it causes them to give up and email me directly. I even tried vbulletin for awhile, but that had its own problems.
GitHub (once you get past the signup) is perfect in this regard. Just open a ticket and then comment on it.
I wish GitHub had more in regards to bug tracking, for example being able to create states (open, in progress, closed) as well as labels.
These days I'm sure there are comparable solutions but having the issue system through github means one less service I need to track, which is also nice (client gets code, client has issue tracking, done).
With all that said I wouldn't use github issue tracking for complex multi-stage applications where the environment is an important factor in the problem.
I was using Pivotal Tracker a few years ago for a large-ish project, and really wanted the client to use it.
It didn't strike me as terribly hard for reasonably bright people, but I under-estimated habit and the degree of resentment some members on the client team had about their pet project being changed.
Assorted attempts at education (I made a really nice screencast!) failed; I was still getting e-mail with Excel or Word docs attached.
We finally came to an understanding and started using Google Docs.
BTW, Github issues is not so bad. A key feature for me for any bug tracker is a Web API, something I can talk to using a command-line tool.
I wrote such a thing for Pivotal Tracker (my Pivotal Slacker Ruby script, now abandoned) and later hacked up a program called GHissues to pull items from Github.
I've been in the position to choose bug trackers for two companies I've worked for, and I still don't feel competent to vote.
It just seems funny to me that a company that also makes a bug tracking system has a really bad one coupled with it's version control hosting. It makes some sense, but it bugs me.
There are no complicated required fields, just name and description, and it mostly doesn't require registration or login because most people are already logged into some Google service. This means that users only need to write their problem and press a button, so they actually do it instead of being scared away by the interface, which is what happened to me with other trackers.
Not that there's a reason why it wouldn't be used with code, just a disclaimer.
The important things are that someone needs to put a decent amount of time into managing the bug list, and you need to be actually willing to devote appropriate resources to fixing them (or better still, eliminating the root causes). If those aren't present you'll just end up with an unmanageable dumping ground regardless of where it lives.
I've just never heard of it.
Do most HN readers have the impression that polls like this are made by some some all-knowing, perfectly fair, professional editor who only puts up well researched, carefully thought out, scientific and objective options in their polls?
It might surprise you, but I'm just another HN reader just like yourself.
I woke up today and thought, "Hey, I'd like to know what other HN readers consider good bugtrackers. Why don't I put up a poll?"
I remembered the names of a few of bugtrackers off the top of my head, but just having a few would make for a pretty lame poll. So I pulled up the wikipedia article on the comparison of bug trackers. It had a million listed, so I thought that might make for too long a poll. So I chose the ones I personally heard of, and added an "Other" category for the rest.
I hope that clears up some of the mystery.
One reason why I found JIRA's omission so surprising is it's widely used by companies that have different departments or roles. It typically becomes the default choice when a company gets large enough to have a PM. Github doesn't scale with roles (yet). JIRA is so common, I'm curious what part of our industry you hang out in to know what growth Atlassian still has :) You probably use tools everyday that I'm also unfamiliar with -- we simply have different experiences.
Disclaimer: Atlassian is about to go public... so I've been doing my research on whether to buy.
And for agile/scrum, Greenhopper is absurdly bad, for the same reason.
Until recently, my team was the only developer group in our company using an issue tracker. Management have decided that every team must now use an issue tracker and that tracker must be HP Quality Center. They're even paying a temp to manually migrate all our Jira issues into QC. We managed to win the battle for Git over IBM Rational ClearCase for a version control system but this kind of thing makes me think it's about time to find a new job.
Downsides? The website's sense of humour is irritating if it doesn't click with you. You have to host it yourself, which can be about a morning of setup. The documentation can be a little bit sparse. But it's the first bug tracking/developer workflow tool I've used that I've actually liked. And I like it a lot.
(I say this in jest, but only a little.) Think about it...
I know so many programmers who get lazy because they have such good debugging tools (Let me just slam something out there and let the debugger catch it.) I hate this.
If we developers would slow down and think a little more about what we're building, we may find a dramatically decreased need for debugging.
Variable local or global? Right variable name? Should that be a function? How much am I repeating myself? How should the data be structured for its intended uses? What's the best way to handle recursion? Where might memory leak? Where's the best place to do this? Which is the best technology for this need? And most of all: Will the next programmer be able to read this and tell what it's doing before they break it?
Slow down. Plan more. Think deeper. Debug less.
Death marches by overworked, sleep deprived, and understaffed development teams are the norm in the industry. It's a wonder that most products aren't even more bug-riddled than they already are.
I would love to live in a world where every developer was competent if not brilliant, and had all the time, training, and motivation in the world to write nothing but perfect code at his leisure.
If you know of a way to this world, I'm all ears.
If you are really against "bug tracker". I don't really understand as they are often mainly used to report new needs, requirement and enhancement rather than crash due to poor coding practices.
* Tickets can be created and updated via email
* Using the GitHub service hook, you can tag commit messages so that they appear as comments on a ticket as well as change the state of the ticket (For example: "Refactor widget behaviour [#123 state:resolved]")
* You can setup milestones (with or without a due date) and assign tickets to them
* Bulk editing of tickets
* Markdown in ticket description and comment fields
* You can easily create "buckets" of tickets based on search terms and filters
* Bugsnag and Airbrake can be configured to automatically create tickets for new exceptions in your app
* Probably some other great features that I've forgotten to mention
I'm surprised as many others that Jira is not on the list