Issue Tracking Ticketing Systems?

An anonymous reader asks: "Our company has expanded to 5 employees, and we are looking at setting up and installing an Issue Tracking System for all employees to use throughout the company. It turns out there are many ticketing systems available in both commercial and open source solutions. We originally planned on using Request Tracker but we were unable to implement it due to the complexities of the system. For our company, we are looking for a simple to install Issue Ticketing system (preferably PHP and MySQL based to be hosted on our basic web hosting) to improve both the efficiency of our company, and improve our record keeping of all of our issues. How do you manage all of your tasks, and what software do you use, if any, to achieve this?"

Comments

trac

[GreatDrok]

We had a problem with people harassing the sysadmin (me) to do stuff and I was having trouble with time management and documenting my workload. We already had a trac system (http://trac.edgewall.org/) in place for other reasons and we used this to implement a sysadmin request system where people could enter their problem in trac and their request would be sent to the sysadmin (or a list of people in our case) who would then resolve the issue and report it as such. This produced a nice audit trail showing requests and their resolutions as well as any outstanding issues. Of course, it is all open source and free which is also nice.

Overkill?

[thegrassyknowl]

I don't mean to sound negative, but at 5 employees there couldn't be too many issues to track, really?

Perhaps just implement a policy that says all requests for change/work/whatever must be formally made by email. Prefix it with [TASK] or something equally dumb and you have a nice way of filtering it into a folder.

It's nice to want to spend the time and implement a flexible, sizeable solution but think of the time to maintain it down the track. For 5 employees is it really worth it? We have about 20 people doing coding/testing (and a handful of other managerial types) on site and we have 1 full time person to manage the issue tracker and source control. That's pretty much all he does (and the occasional IT fill-in when the IT guys take leave).

Re:We use Jira

[MikkoApo]

I've used JIRA at two different employers and it's a very nice product. The interface is powerful and at the same time simple enough (looking at you bugzilla). It works with different databases, but it also has a standalone install which a breeze to install. Comes with nice integration to cvs ( & subversion too I think) and (paying?) customers get the source code too so you can integrate however you like.

The only downside to Jira is that it's price tag (for business users) has risen steadily, but at least they've given free licenses to open source projects like Apache Software Foundation, Codehaus and JBoss.

I've also used Mercury's TestDirector, but it seems like a glorified excel-sheet when compared to JIRA. TD is more suitable for reporting bugs, and it doesn't support the software development process like JIRA does. Jira has projects, components, issue links, releases, change notes, workflows, security levels, reports and so on.

We also have an inhouse built issue tracking system. It works to some extent, but its GUI doesn't really scale to handling large number of tickets. And since it's not developed actively it will probably stay as it is for some time.