We are dealing with different kind of projects with our team and collaboration and team work are very important aspect for our productivity. We need to follow up all issues in a central platform where all our team members can reach easily online and submit/edit any possible issue. This also includes our support, QA and management teams. The development team also uses Subversion as version control and integration would be also an important role with issue tracking system. And system will not be only issue tracking system and we need to utilize it as a project management base with some kind of share documents such as in wiki format etc.
We have started to use svnrepository.com for SVN and Trac systems. But somehow we decided to find another solution because of configuration issues and usability problems on the pre configured Trac system there. We also tried BugZilla for issue tracking but it was more complicated for our other teams.
Depending on experience of one of our team member, we decided to try FogBugz as an alternative issue tracking platform. But we have seen that SVN integration with svnrepositories is not possible with hosted FogBugz system and we decided to change our SVN platform as beanstalkapp.com.
BeanstalkApp platform is amazing! We are very happy about the provided web interface and management tools. Integration with FogBugz ans some other platform is also very easy and works like a charm. But when we consider the price that we pay for whole team members for FogBugz hosted service (25 USD/m), it looks like it is a bit more than what we expect from a issue tracking system.
Now I am considering an alternative platform for issue tracking and I shared this idea with our great community and got some feedbacks and would like to share with you.
The Trac solution is still valuable and most of the suggestion was about Trac. In this case, I would be curious hosted solution quality to configure hosted Trac instances and the most popular suggestion was CVSdude.com. But when we consider that we have already a great SVN service, it does not look a real solution for our case but would be suggested for others who are looking for a new platform which can provide both SVN and issue tracking via Trac.
In this case I will try to install a Trac instance on any of our servers, and try to integrate with BeanstalkApp. I do not think this would be a problem but when I consider the maintenance time this would not be a good option.
The other valuable option would be trying Project Tracker (projecttracker.riaforge.org) code which is in ColdFusion and looks promising project. Being able to update/improve the code as we like also would be a nice solution for customization requests.
These are where we are now and let us see how I will come up for a better solution.
Please do not hesitate to share your experiences.
Jan 5
Jan 5, 2009 at 2:22 AM Yes, assembla.com was one of the best complete solutions that I have tried. There are some other nice services also and here is a huge list with some possible solutions for Trac based approach: http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/CommercialServices
Jan 6, 2009 at 12:41 AM Did you try to use Redmine? Which is quite a handy collaborative tool. Though the interface looks a bit complicated at first, when you are used to it, its really worth the effort. It supports plugins(in Ruby) as well, SVN, Email notification etc.
http://www.redmine.org/
Jan 6, 2009 at 8:38 AM @Mathias, I will definitely try it. Looks promising. Thanks for sharing.
If you consider also a client/server model app with web support, I also has forgotten to mention TestTrack Pro (seapine.com) as an alternative solution. I got a phone call from them this morning and their sales looks responsible.
Apr 16, 2009 at 10:28 AM Another great option is TeamSupport.com (http://www.teamsupport.com). TeamSupport is a bug tracking and help desk tool designed to let customer support, QA, and development all work together on the same piece of software.
It is a hosted solution, and the first three users are completely free.
We have also just released integration with BeanStalk (and in fact use BeanStalk ourselves!).