Issue Tracking for Java Development Teams

[TimLawrence]

Hi all

I have just joined a Java development team (of about 6 Java developers
and 5 database developers) who are looking to improve their issue
tracking process with tool support and am at the stage of starting to
evaluate candidate applications.

My notes so far amount to the following:

Rational ClearQuest: fully featured but prohivitely expensive. non
trivial learning curve
Bugzilla: Free to use but likely to require customisation for use in
an organisation
Atlassian JIRA: Not too expensive, fully featured, intuitive

As you can see I am steering towards JIRA but I'd appreciate any views
that you might have on these or other tools that might do the job.

regards

Tim Lawrence

[tom.g...@gmail.com]

Hi,

If you have the budget and your stakeholders like documentation ! then
the full rational suit (RUP process) is a good standard way to go.
I've used that to track requirements, issues, provide documentation,
etc. etc. We had a separate pure bug tracking system during that
project.

Bugzilla is an excellent pure bug tracking tool but will not help you
with issue tracking and project related activities.

Based on that fact you said you want a bug and issue tracker I'd opt
for JIRA.

Thanks

Tom

[Dave Patterson]

JIRA does seem to be the popular choice for this kind of thing.

We are using TRAC for internal planning and issue tracking on my
current project. It's very developer-centric - good integration with
SVN and eclipse via mylin. Not massively powerful but not too heavy
either. http://trac.edgewall.org/

Dave Patterson.

On Jan 3, 9:10 am, "tom.gor...@gmail.com" <tom.gor...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Steve Loughran]

On Jan 2, 2008 6:39 AM, TimLawrence <timlaw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> I have just joined a Java development team (of about 6 Java developers
> and 5 database developers) who are looking to improve their issue
> tracking process with tool support and am at the stage of starting to
> evaluate candidate applications.
>
> My notes so far amount to the following:
>
> Rational ClearQuest: fully featured but prohivitely expensive. non
> trivial learning curve

Fear and worship the Rational product suite. Sometimes you really do
need to sacrifice small animals to keep them alive.

1. the per-user licensing fees make it fairly tricky
2. the native windows app is fairly heavy
3. the web page has a tendency to time out when entering a long bug

disclaimer: experience from 2001.

There's pretty good integration with cruise control, which is very
powerful right up to the moment it stops working, which is usually
just before a deadline. When other SCM tools fail, you can't check out
or check in; when Cruise Control plays up, you may as well go home
until its fixed. such is the price of a version-aware filesystem.

> Bugzilla: Free to use but likely to require customisation for use in
> an organisation

-also has limited customisation; the workflow is pretty inflexible.
Can be outsourced via collab.net and the commercial wing of
sourceforge.

> Atlassian JIRA: Not too expensive, fully featured, intuitive

Wonderful.
-good integration with Eclipse (mylin), though that can put heavy
load on the servers (eclipse 3.3.0 has a bug in its mylin that managed
to lock up the apache jira server, for example)
-good for generating release reports
http://jira.smartfrog.org/jira/browse/SFOS?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:roadmap-panel

-integrates with SVN/CVS, by polling the repository for changes with
issue IDs added. e.g.
http://jira.smartfrog.org/jira/browse/SFOS-570?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.ext.subversion:subversion-commits-tabpanel

>
> As you can see I am steering towards JIRA but I'd appreciate any views
> that you might have on these or other tools that might do the job.

Its really good, at least the free version we use.

Limitations
-you do need real/virtual server powerful enough to run tomcat...if
you host confluence on the same machine you will find tomcat running
out of memory regularly...it seems OK in its own JVM
-no easy way to move defects from one tracker to another, which is a
need if you have more than one project hosted on different servers.

-steve

[Mike Jones]

+1 for Trac :-)

Its a bit annoying that you have to use a command line tool to
configure things like milestones and components rather than all being
through a web interface. That said, it is easy to use and comes with a
Wiki.

Cheers
Mike