Rally obviously has some Defect Tracking capabilities.
My question is; it is good/flexible enough to serve as the sole Defect Tracker of an organization? Or is it more common that general defect tracking is done in another tool like Bugzilla or JIRA? (Possibly using a Rally Connector to integrate them).
We are currently on Bugzilla but are ramping up Rally usage. If Rally can do Bugzilla's job, I'd happily get rid of Bugzilla and have one less system to worry about. Has anybody done that?
Stack Overflow is usually used to ask and answer questions regarding programming and code. So this is probably not the best forum to get an accurate answer to your question. That being said...
I have been a Rally engineer for a number of years. Internally we use Rally to manage our defects and I personally think it is a painless solution. The way that Rally can roll up defects and the work they represent from a task level all the way to the portfolio level is useful and I personally hate to waste my time trying to keep multiple systems in sync.
I know plenty of customers still use other defect tracking solutions in conjunction with Rally using our connectors and they seem pretty satisfied with that hybrid solution. I was on the team that maintained those connectors last year and we had plenty of happy customers. I actually was one of the pair that wrote the initial Bugzilla connector and it worked well to keep the systems in sync.
Probably not the most impartial answer but I would at least check into just using Rally and if it seems to be missing something you loved in your old system take the time to let us know through Rally Ideas.
Related
Intro:
I'm working for a contractor company. We're making SW for different corporate clients, each with their own rules, SW standards etc.
Problem:
The result is, that we are using several bug-tracking systems. The amount of tickets flow is relatively big and the SLA are deadly sometimes. The main problem is, that we are keeping track of these tickets in our own BT (currently Mantis) but we're also communicating with clients in theirs BT. But as it is, two many channels of communication are making too much information noise.
Solution, progress:
Actual solution is an employee having responsibility for synchronizing the streams and keeping track of the SLA and many other things. It's consuming quite a large part of his time (cca 70%) that can be spend on something more valuable. The other thing is, that he is not fast enough and sometimes the sync is not really synced. Some parts of the comments are left only on one system, some are lost completely. (And don't start me at holidays or sickness, that's where the fun begins)
Question:
How to automate this process: aggregating tasks, watching SLA, notifying the right people etc. partially or all together?
Thank you, for your answers.
You need something like Zapier. It can map different applications and synchronize data between them. It works simply:
You create zap (for example between redmine and teamwork).
You configure mapping (how items/attributes in redmine maps to items/attributes in teamwork)
You generate access tokens in both systems and write them to zap.
Zapier makes regular synchronization between redmine and teamwork.
But mantis is not yet supported by Zapier. If all/most of your clients BT are in Zapier's apps list, you may move your own BT to another platform or make a request to Zapier for mantis support.
Another way is develop your own synchronization service that will connect to all client's BTs as each employee using login/password/token and download updates to your own BT. It is hard way and this solution requires continious development to support actual virsions of client's BTs.
You can have a look a Slack : https://slack.com/
It's a great tools for group conversations
Talk, share, and make decisions in open channels across your team, in
private groups for sensitive matters, or use direct messages
one-to-one.
you can have a lot of integrations tools, and you can use Zapier https://zapier.com/ with it to programm triggers.
With differents channels you can notifying the right people partially or all together in group conversation :)
The obvious answer is to create integrations between all of the various BT's. Without knowing what those are, it's hard to say if that's entirely possible. Most modern BTs have an API and support integrations. Some, especially more desktop based ones, don't. For those you probably have to monitor a database directly.
Zapier, as someone already suggested, is a great tool for creating integrations and may already have some of the ones yo need available. I love Slack and it has an API, but messages are basically just text and unless you want to do some kind of delimiting when you post messages to its API, it probably isn't going to work.
I'm not sure what budget is, but it will cost resources to create the integrations. I'd suggest that you hire someone to simply manage these. Someone who's sole responsibility is to cross-populate the internal and the external bug tracking system and track the progress in each. All you really need is someone with good attention to detail for this, they don't have to be a developer. This should be more cost effective than using developer resources on this.
The other alternative is simply to stop. If your requirements dictate that you use your clients' bug tracking software for projects you do for them, just use their software and stop duplicating the effort. If you need some kind of central repository or something for managing work maybe just a simple table somewhere or spreadsheet with the client, the project, the issue number, the status and if possible a link to the issue in the client's BT. I understand the need and desire for centralizing this, but if it's stifling productivity, then the opportunity costs are too high IMO.
If you create an integration tool foe this, you will indeed have a very viable product. This is actually a pretty common problem.
Scenario:
Currently we are in the process of system and integration testing. Every day we get lots of defect raised by testers. Most of these defects do not match with requirement we were given. Lots of scenarios are new to developers. Requirement we had was signed off by business.
Could someone clarify how to distinguish between Defect vs CR?
Everything that was not a requirement is a change-request.
But live is unfortunately not that easy, so please read on.
Quarrels on what is a defect and what is a change-request are very common in projects. Managing the situation is difficult because you often have to make compromises.
I have seen project managers being removed by programme managers because they insisted to much that all the defects are really change requests. They often were right but still there behavior was not helpful for the overall progress of the programme. I have also seen project managers who killed themselves by accepting every defect and built castles though never originally required and effort estimated for.
I personally always make absolutely sure that my managers know that I am building features not originally required that came in under the disguise of defects. I also make sure the client/tester knows that this is my viewpoint. But also I am very tolerant in my consideration what a defect is.
Example: I recently joint a project where we developed a financial payments system and another programmer said to me "It is outrages what they want have that is not a defect this is a CR!". I looked at it and due to my background in this business domain I thought it actually is very fundamental requirement and asking for a CR for this is really laughable. So I decided we fix it without making a fuss about it.
Also the following questions are worth to consider:
Are you in a fix price project? Do you still have resources and show real greatness by adding features without moaning that will give you a good reputation and a future contract?
Do you get penalized if you accept a CR as a defect? Is a low-number of defects a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and affecting your career?
Was the requirement definition poor at the beginning and you accepted it? Was the requirement mentioned in the defect real obvious and could be considered implied? E.g. never specified that amount field should only allow numeric values but still it makes sense.
Have you accepted requirements without asking about the whole big picture and are partially responsible?
Is the client ripping you off and exploiting your inability to say no and reject the defect?
In projects I always try to get the best for the client but make sure I am not being penalized undue.
I'm looking for a free or commercial issue tracker. I've looked at a dozen of them, but I can't find what I need.
These are my requirements:
Not only for software. I need a more general tracker in which "complaints" about products other than software can also be recorded.
Very easy to use, for non-technical users
(optional) rich text editing, possibility to add images between the lines, etc.
I've looked at Bugzilla, SupportSuite, Mantis, but these are to much software oriented for my case.
Strange, no-one mentioned Trello [ www.trello.com ]
Its :
General purpose
Software related tracking can also be done
Collaboration on anything with multiple people
Free to use [ Even for multiple users ]
Aimed at a non-technical user
Perfect for your use-case.
Or take a loot at Gemini -- we have IT hardware, Help Desk and all our software dev projects in one place. Gemini does allow for different "meta data" per project type so this works for us. Look at their "white paper" - may be of help to you in terms of set up.
Usually the commercial ones are more polished than the open-source ones, here are some options:
Atlassian JIRA - an industry veteran, very complete solution. If you have a small team (up to 5 people), they also used to have a very low-cost version.
JetBrains YouTrack - relative newcomer, an probably a bit too "keyboard-centric" for your needs.
See also comparison of issue-tracking systems.
Maybe you're looking for a service like http://getsatisfaction.com/ or http://uservoice.com/. They are very customer-centric, and I've seen them used both for software products and for feedback on other things entirely.
Also, I've made Mantis receive email directly both to new and existing issues - f.ex. if subject contains an issue number like [1234] the email becomes a note to the issue 1234.
This way the customer doesn't know about Mantis, you can bcc Mantis with issue numbers, and it's possible to customize workflow in Mantis very much to suit your process needs.
In addition, you can have separate projects in Mantis which can receive from different email addresses, like one for bugs and one for support issues.
Try out Assembla, am not sure whether it is free or what.
Or you may try with googling JIRA
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm working at a development shop that is using outdated bug tracking
software. They're currently weighing in on alternatives to replace it.
This software tracks our bugs, as well as tasks for new feature requests.
We build a core application that we configure and support for a variety of clients. In this vein, we do have customer service techs to provide assistance with both core application bugs, and bugs with the client configuration.
Because of this slant towards customer service/technical support, the proposed alternative is Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I have no experience with it, but from what I can tell, it's meant more for client-facing issue tracking than it is for bug tracking and QA from a development standpoint.
Has anyone used Microsoft Dynamics CRM and found that this would be suitable software for bug tracking?
I'm having trouble recognizing benefits of using CRM software to track bugs/tasks. I could understand it for the sales side of things, but I'd think that having separate software for bug tracking makes more sense than bundling everything together. Has anyone else run into this kind of predicament - what was the outcome, and/or persuasive arguments for or against such an approach?
EDIT: Customers don't need to add bugs directly; they call our support desk and we open a ticket. Our current software was extended to do both issue tracking and bug/feature tracking as an all-in-one system. Unfortunately, it doesn't do a great job of it - the break occurs at a source control level. We cannot associate changesets to a bug or task.
What I ended up proposing is using TFS for development tasks/bugs, which provides us with automatic changeset linking, and continue to look down the avenue of using Microsoft Dynamics CRM for customer issues. There may be ways to configure the two to work together, but if not, then a bug would need a comment added with an issue # to correlate the issue to a bug that goes through development/QA/deployment.
Thanks for the answers!
I wouldn't. A CRM (whilst some of them have task tracking and even software bug tracking built is) is not, (generally), developer or product centric, but customer centric.
I would suggest you look at something like JIRA for bug/improvement/dev work tracking. Depending on the size of your team you can get started for US$10.
In terms of customer facing support, if you need to allow customers to directly create issues, JIRA might get a bit expensive. If so you could consider GetSatisfation which allows you to provide front end support and includes integration with JIRA for your internal tracking/dev work.
Using get satisfaction (or an equivalent) can also help you crowd source your product's support process, potentially reducing your on-costs.
CRM is very customizable, and can do pretty much whatever you want it to do. We use it a ton internally... our development items are created, bugs are tracked against those, client cases are opened there, and we track those against bugs and items as well. We've got some initial work done on linking up our source control to it as well, so we can pinpoint the commits that a particular item involved.
You'll certainly need to customize it to get it to work the way you want... that may involve as little as adding some entities and fields, or as involved as writing custom ASPX pages, plugins, and workflows. I'd say if you're looking to leverage other Dynamics CRM functionality in the future, it's worth a look. If you're looking for a bug tracking system to just buy and start using, it may not be for you.
The team I'm part of manage a number of software projects - and most of the stuff we do is end to end, from requirements tracking, to project management to purchasing and setup - a big pain is tracking of financials as we have a whole process to go through for our financials. At the moment we use a spreadsheet and store all the invoices and purchase orders in a shared folder. Its difficult to capture expenses and relate them back to projects that are ongoing or completed. Anyone got better ideas? Hope this topic is relevant.
I'm just throwing this out there but Scrum seems like a methodology that might lend itself to tracking this kind of stuff easily.
I use the time tracking aspects of JIRA with a bunch of custom fields that let me note issues as having been billed for (complete with storing the invoice number details against the JIRA issue). It's easy to relate hours worked to time billed. Might not work if you're billing for functionality rather than hours, but for $/hr work it's perfect.
You're talking about bookkeeping. Your best bet is probably to talk to accountant who organised books for a software company before. Alternatively you could read up on bookkeeping basics.
This question is not strictly software development related, although software business has some traits that make it different, i.e. absence of raw materials.
Best of luck with your question, I personally find it interesting, but I don't believe it belongs on stackoverflow.
you could try http://projectsputnik.com This software combines project management and billing
If you are using Jira, you can try Clerk — Invoicing and Billing for Jira app. Jira has projects and time tracking feature and this add-on does the invoicing and billing on top of that. I hope that helps.
How about using a wiki, something like Confluence? And then you can export to a spreadsheet. and import back again...