Client issue tracking and documentation

[Jeff Judge]

Hello all!

I was curious to here how people are handling client issue tracking
and documentation. My company (Interactive Mediums) is launching a web
service for external clients to connect to our SMS messaging platform,
and I would like to set a web site for clients to track issues, read
documentation, etc. I thought Trac or RedMine might serve this purpose
well, but wanted to get your opinions.

Thanks,
Jeff

[Robby Russell]

Jeff,

I'd like to answer this in two parts since you have distinct goals
for these, which could be one application, but may not necessarily be
required.

Documentation

Quick question: Do your clients need to be able to manage the
documentation content themselves?

For development projects, we have historically created and hosted
wikis (instiki, junebug) and provided our clients with access to them.

For our hosting customers, we have an instance of Junebug running
here: http://docs.planetargon.com/

Issue Tracking:

We're using Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com/) and it's working
good enough for the short term. We're disappointed with some of the
Interaction Design decisions made and are reviewing alternatives.
Trac isn't very end-user friendly... and neither of Bugzilla.
Obviously, a reoccurring pattern of developers trying to design
interfaces for developers and non-developers. (see FogBugz for
another example of a developer-designed application that doesn't win
my heart).

Good luck, and I'm hoping that someone can point out at least one
issue tracker that doesn't suck when it comes to user interaction. ;-)

Cheers,

-Robby

--
Robby Russell
Founder and Executive Director

PLANET ARGON, LLC
Design, Development, and Hosting with Ruby on Rails

http://www.planetargon.com/
http://www.robbyonrails.com/

+1 503 445 2457
+1 877 55 ARGON [toll free]
+1 815 642 4068 [fax]

[Anthony Eden]

JIRA for issue tracking and Confluence for document management. These
are both commercial products from the same vendor and both are very
good.

If you are on a budget then RedMine would probably do the job.

V/r
Anthony

--
Cell: 808 782-5046
Current Location: Melbourne, FL

[Jarkko Laine]

On 25.7.2007, at 6.48, Anthony Eden wrote:

>
> JIRA for issue tracking and Confluence for document management. These
> are both commercial products from the same vendor and both are very
> good.

I have to disagree here as far as the user-friendliness of Jira goes.
I find its UI very unpolished and unintuitive, resembling more a
traditional enterprise software than something I'd like to use.

I haven't used Lighthouse much so I can't say anything about its
interaction design decisions Robbie mentioned, but at least I know
that Rick and Justin have especially put a lot of effort in its UI.
The same doesn't seem true (to me) with Jira.

Cheers,
//jarkko

--
Jarkko Laine
http://jlaine.net
http://dotherightthing.com
http://www.railsecommerce.com
http://odesign.fi

[Anthony Eden]

On 7/24/07, Jarkko Laine <jar...@jlaine.net> wrote:
> On 25.7.2007, at 6.48, Anthony Eden wrote:
>
> >
> > JIRA for issue tracking and Confluence for document management. These
> > are both commercial products from the same vendor and both are very
> > good.
>
> I have to disagree here as far as the user-friendliness of Jira goes.
> I find its UI very unpolished and unintuitive, resembling more a
> traditional enterprise software than something I'd like to use.

Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree then. :-) I assume that
you've actually used JIRA extensively in order to make that judgment?
I'm actually quite curious about specifics if you'd like to email me
off list.

To put things in context: we use JIRA for a team of 10 developers and
about 50 users spread across 5 decent-sized government projects, so in
that context it works well. If you're freelancing or working with one
other developer, then I would consider it overkill and would probably
go with something open source (like redMine).

V/r
Anthony

[Jarkko Laine]

On 25.7.2007, at 15.38, Anthony Eden wrote:

>
> On 7/24/07, Jarkko Laine <jar...@jlaine.net> wrote:
>> On 25.7.2007, at 6.48, Anthony Eden wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> JIRA for issue tracking and Confluence for document management.
>>> These
>>> are both commercial products from the same vendor and both are very
>>> good.
>>
>> I have to disagree here as far as the user-friendliness of Jira goes.
>> I find its UI very unpolished and unintuitive, resembling more a
>> traditional enterprise software than something I'd like to use.
>
> Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree then. :-) I assume that
> you've actually used JIRA extensively in order to make that judgment?
> I'm actually quite curious about specifics if you'd like to email me
> off list.

I don't know if I can say extensively but I've used it with a number
of (bigger) clients where the clients have used it as their issue
tracking system. So all in all the contexts should be right on for Jira.

My complaints are not as much about the features as they are about
the general design of the user interface. An example: the probably
most important link on a project page, "Create new issue" is not only
looking just like all the other links on the page, it is grouped
together with "Release notes", a link that ostensibly has nothing to
do with the first link.

So, all in all, nothing against its features, I just think they could
hire a good UI designer or two.

[Myles A. Braithwaite]

I guess I am old school. We usually just give documentation in HTML form and Issue Tracking is done though emails the automatically get added to our Trac instance for that client.

--
Myles A. Braithwaite
Monkey in your Soul - http://miys.net/
my...@monkeyinyoursoul.com

[Jim Mulholland]

We have been using Unfuddle ( http://www.unfuddle.com ) for issue
tracking on three projects for close to a year now and have been very
pleased. It is very user / client friendly. On the downside, it does
not have integrated documentation or wiki.

Is anybody currently using RedMind? It looks like this app has come a
very long way since we were looking last year. According to their
change log, they have had 6 releases since the time we were looking at
issue tracking applications including a fairly large release last
week. It looks like they are almost as robust as Trac with a much
more user-friendly design. I would be interested to hear the pros /
cons of that app.

- Jim Mulholland

On Jul 25, 8:16 am, "Myles A. Braithwaite"

[Jean-Etienne DURAND]

Hi,

We are using redMine for some of our projects. Even if it's 0.5, it's quite stable.

But it's really _not_ user-friendly (yet). Query filtering, ticket status management, ... can be improved a lot.

 

Jean-Etienne

[Jeff Judge]

Thanks Robby, you pointed out a requirement that I had in my head that
isn't really necessary - that the documentation and issue tracking be
integrated within one application.

Lighthouse looks to be able to easily solve our needs, and we can
definitely post a wiki for documentation. I will let you know if I
find anything else that does a better job.

As for documentation, we've been using MediaWiki internally to track
technical documentation, as well as our product requirements and road
map. I think that will look into a more of an user friendly wiki like
junebug for client documentation.

Thanks,
Jeff

> http://www.planetargon.com/http://www.robbyonrails.com/

[Jeff Judge]

Thanks Jarkko and Anthony,

I introduced Jira and Confluence to a past company and while those are
great products for large teams with lots of projects, I feel that
they're a bit heavy weight for our needs.

Cheers,
Jeff

> smime.p7s
> 3KDownload

[Robby Russell]

On Jul 24, 2007, at 5:02 PM, Jeff Judge wrote:

Looks like someone asked something similar on Slashdot.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/29/1914203&from=rss

Might be worth reviewing some of the apps that were mentioned.