What's your preferred bug tracking / project planning system?

Xojo’s recent move to GitLab has got me thinking again about moving my company from FogBugz, which gives every impression of being on life-support.

Is anyone using a bug tracking / project planning system that they particularly like? If so, what do you like about it?

I would have been tempted to start using GitLab, but their FogBugz import tool fell over when trying to import either our main project (for our Xojo desktop app) or our much smaller iOS app project. I can write a custom importer, but thought I should see whether anyone has any particular recommendations or warnings before I do that!

I’m using a hosted Redmine solution. There are addons for project management.

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I use a self hosted Redmine install

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I used the Gitlab API to move us from Feedback (a PostgreSQL database) to Issues.

Perhaps you can do the same with Fogbugz? I’m going to be talking about it during my session in Nashville but if you want to discuss it before that, let me know.

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Thanks, Geoff: if we go for GitLab, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing and today’s tests show that I can extract the data I need from the FogBugz API.

Are there any particular reasons you’re willing to share as to why Xojo chose GitLab?

Jira / atlassian all the way here.

I just cannot say enough good things about them.

I was sworn Jira hater. But all the companies that I had worked for that had it had on self hosted versions. I think thats where where it was bad, the companies probably not knowing how to run it and such.

But basically Jira cloud is awesome. And for small businesses it is free basically. So I use their whole experience, Issue tracking, Git, planning boards, document management, I use it all.

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Thanks, Björn! I must admit to some scepticism about Jira because it seems to have become a four letter word in many developer circles, but your experience makes me want to take a look at it.

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For some time I used the old clubhouse.io for issues tracking as it helped me and looked well for my multiple projects. Then they renamed the business to ShortCut, got rid of the native iOS apps and my use of it just plummeted. I could never remember what they were called and had issues with adding stuff in iOS web browser so I finally canned the subscription/account.

So far I just issues in my Github repo’s. (Oh well).

We have a blog post that goes into that - Improving Feedback – Xojo Programming Blog

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As many of my customers know, I use a self-hosted support solution based on a WordPress plugin. I’ve tried others, but this is more catered to what I need in order to shape my focus as much as help customers. For a larger organization, it wouldn’t hold up but the layout and flow helps me immensely as opposed to the larger solutions I’ve used. Integration with my sales site was also dead simple since it, too, is based on WordPress.

In my case, it’s important that my support software work for me as much as possible, both technically and psychologically.

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One thing I would say against Issues (xojo at least). You type something in to search the current list and it is then completely impossible to copy and paste that into the new issue dialog box. Utterly frustrating.

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It would be interesting to hear from Xojo why “Issues” was chosen from GitLab and not GitHub. As far as I know, Xojo also uses GitHub as source control. So GitHub would have been the obvious choice.

Does Github even have any advanced issue tracking system ?

GitHub’s system is comparable. They have projects, milestones, assignments, tags, and so on. I think without actual code in the repo though, it’d be a little weird, and Xojo couldn’t let users authenticate with their Xojo account either. It’d require users to create a GitHub account, which isn’t a great requirement when you’re trying to collect info from them.

GitHub doesn’t allow you to have a private source code repo and a public issue tracker linked to it. At least not without dirty hacks.

Yeah, it’d basically be an empty repo just used for issue tracking. Not exactly the right design.