I thought I would ask this here, as there's so much programming talent. I'm about to hire a palm progamming company to develop a small database reference application for auto mechanics. My company has never released a software-only package before, we're primarily a hard goods company (we have released one custom-hardware totally embedded product)

Since the application is fairly basic, and the contracted firm has a solid track record with much larger/enterprise wide software, I'm hoping that things will be pretty stable and that bugs & installation difficulties will be small.

However, I do want to set up an use a common bug tracking list and version list at a site that both my company and the developers can access an use as a standing communication resource & reference location. This site could then also be used by the tech support guys for answering end users' questions and for fresh bug submission.

This product is not open source, so I assume sourceforge is out.

Any thoughts or advice? Thanks.

-Zeke

Bugzilla.

Yeah, what he said.

On reflection, you probably deserve a more complete answer.

Bugzilla is the free open-source bugtracking system that the Mozilla people have published. And when I say open-source, I mean that the bugzilla software is open-source, not that your programs need to be open source.

It's what the Empeg guys use for their bug tracking.

I only interact with it from the beta tester's perspective, but I can attest that it seems to have a lot of useful features from that point of view. Entering a new bug is painless and straightforward. Searching for existing bugs is not painless, but it's straightforward and very complete. You can search on all sorts of fields and criteria. I figure that the complexity of the search form is necessary for it to be so powerful.

Rob would have to chime in and say whether it works well from the project manager's perspective. He's able to customize the user interface pretty well, but I don't know how much management overhead there is to keep it running.

Definitely Bugzilla ... I've quested for years for the ultimate bug system and Bugzilla is the closest I've come to being satisfied. It's ugly out of box, but a little spit and polish and you can make it look nice (and if you don't care about the looks, it just plain works). Installation is pretty easy (compared to some other open source projects), but you will need to know a little about unix/linux/mysql to do it. I've used it both as an enduser as my primary bug system at work for the past 3 years and as an enduser through the Empeg bug system and both are very nice.

oh yeah and it's free.

ms

I guess we have a winner! I just greenlighted the project, here we go...

Thanks for the advice everybody.

-Zeke

It's what the Empeg guys use for their bug tracking.

It's what we use for tracking bugs on the car player. For the S-series (and the other stuff we're working on at the moment) we use DevTrack. It sucks.

If you liked Bugzilla, why'd you change? SonicBlue requirement?

I don't like bugzilla that much, my favorite system is RT: Request Tracker.

Free, uses perl/mason and mysql, and I found it intuitive to work with and relatively easy to customize. i.e. although I'm not a perl guy, I added RSS feeds and such to my installation. The only problem is that the developer keeps coming up with new versions. Finally got 2.x where I like it and he's already made the first 3.x release. And yes, the database format does change between major releases, sigh.

SonicBlue requirement?

Yeah.

Looks like I'm a bit late but anywayy.... We have just started using Mantis

I setup and installed Bugzilla but found it overly complicated particularly for noobs to use to report bugs.

So far it seems pretty good. It's pretty quiet on the development front, but it seems to work quite well. PHP + MySQL and it has been quite easy to add features I wanted.

I actually think I found it as a result of someone here pointing it out.