Since I recently decided to give my own bug tracking solution the Anton Chigurh Treatment, I’ve been evaluating issue tracking solutions to move forward with.
When I set out to build my own tracker a few years ago, it was mainly because I found the existing solutions to be a bit too heavy for a small, one man development shop. Though I’m confident that BugZilla or Trac work great for large corporations or open source projects, it just felt like I was trying to solve a problem with a Hummer when all I needed was something comparable to a Kia.
Going into my evaluations I knew my biggest issue was I didn’t want to host another Rails application. While hosting for Rails has eased up over the past year thanks to mod_rails, it’s still a heavy resource load on a server and I can’t justify the extra costs.
My other semi-requirement, was I wanted a solution that would ease my support burden and make it a bit easier to transition a feature request or bug report from a customer into my tracking solution.
I ended up evaluating four solutions:
- FogBugz
- Lighthouse
- Bento
- Custom Core Data solution
I have always longed for a native OS X bug tracking interface, which is why I evaluated building something on my own, but as I wrote a few months ago, rolling your own solution is a time suck that takes away from actual development time of your product.
I was incredibly interested in Bento for a tracking solution, because of those reasons. Bento is an application that I have wanted to use for quite a while, but never really found a use for it in my daily workflow. I opted against using it because it was somewhat limiting should I ever (god forbid) have to jump back into client development full-time. I need to be able to share my bug queues with clients, and that’s not exactly feasible with Bento.
I’ve used Lighthouse for a while as part of a client gig I still maintain and my part-time work with SmileOnMyMac. It’s a beautiful, minimalist bug tracking solution with great integration into GitHub. I was also a big fan of it’s minimalist take on categorizing bugs. Rather than having to assign them to different areas, Lighthouse supports tagging tickets on the fly. I decided against it mainly because of cost. It would have been a recurring $25 a month fee for Lighthouse and if I wanted to use their new Tender support system, another $20. I make $15/license software so cost is prohibitive.
I settled on FogBugz partially for that reason. They offer a great Student Startup plan that lets up to two people use a full-featured version of FogBugz for free. It’s a great premise and definitely sucked me in.
FogBugz certainly isn’t the prettiest girl at the ball, but she certainly has the best moves. The UI definitely has a Windows-esque vibe. That’s not to say that it is unattractive or poorly thought out, but the design choices are certainly not something you will be seeing in any Apple produced Web application. My main point of UI contention is the homepage is incredibly busy with links galore and the drop-down menuing system sometimes misses clicks when I use it via Webkit/Fluid.
Beyond those gripes though, it has been a pretty positive experience. The case window is extremely well laid out and balances the tightrope between too few and too many fields. The UI to create new cases doesn’t get in my way, which is important.
I was also drawn into FogBugz’s email support system. You can tell the application to check a POP3 account for new messages and they will appear in your FogBugz inbox. Being able to track new and open support tickets from a single interface is a big win over keeping my Mail and iPhone inboxes stuffed with support email. The autosort and spam filtering capabilities are also top notch, which has help cut down on the amount of spam I receive. Though I still use GetSatisfaction as a public forum for Second Gear, I am now promoting email-based support on the company Web site and in-application because it feels like a better workflow to me.
There are a ton of features I don’t use in the application such as the wiki, discussion forums, or time tracking reports, but they aren’t cluttering the UI in a way that I can’t ignore them.
Overall I’d say that the FogBugz transition has been a win. I feel like I’m more productive and it’s one less hassle now that I’m not in charge of hosting my own tracker. My only hope for the 7.0 release that Fog Creek is working on is a more polished, less utilitarian look and feel. There are tasteful ways to do modern design. Hopefully they have someone on the team looking into it.
