One man bugtracker?

Question

Recently I've been doing lots of weekend coding, and have began to really need a bugtracker as things are gaining speed. This is probably the worst case scenario because I basically have to let things cool down over the week,so I simply can't remember the bugs in my head. So far I've been using a text file to jot down bugs,but I'd rather use something a bit better.

The biggest points here are ease of use and very little setup time.Don't want to spend more than an hour learning the basics and trying to install something. Also in my case I'm on a Mac so that would help, but solutions for other platforms are welcomed as they will likely help others.

Answer 1

Trac or Redmine are both pretty good. I don't know how easy they are to set up on a Mac.

Answer 2

If you're working on a LAMPP stack, then for ease of setup and use I would probably recommend Mantis. It's written in PHP / MySQL and the only installation involved was specifying where the database should be created and what credentials should be used.

Oh, and its FOSS.

Answer 3

FogBugz has a student/startup edition that's free indefinitely, for 2 or less users.

Answer 4

Personally, I use Excel. (Wait, come back, I'm not crazy!) For a bigger / team project, I've gotten a ton of mileage out of Bugzilla, but that tends to be kind of overkill for a one-person project.

But, a well-organized spreadsheet, with columns for things like "status", "description", "code module", "resolved date," etc, gets you pretty close to what you'd need for a small project. Sorting a spreadsheet by column isn't anywhere near a search, but its a whole lot better than "find in text file."

Heck, if you use Google docs rather than excel, you can even publish the thing as an RSS feed and get it anywhere.

And, the major advantage is that the setup time and learning curve are both effectively nil.

Addendum: And of course, the instant your "One-Person Bug Tracker" becomes a "Two-Person Bug Tracker" you must switch to something better. Bugzilla, FogBugz, anything. Trust me, I've been there.

Answer 5

You can use fogbugz for free if you're a one man team. It's super easy to use and quick to learn.

They made it so that bugs are really easy to enter, no mandatory fields.

Answer 6

It's worth mentioning that FogBugz also has a free version for up to 2 users, which would suit you. It is hosted so there is no installation and you can use something like Fluid to access it in its own window.

Answer 7

I use Mantis at home and I'm happy with it. It can be a pain in the arse to get it working so you can choose to download a free and ready-made VM installation. Cannot be easier than that,

Answer 8

Maybe a spreadsheet would be the next logical step? I know it sounds really un-sexy, but if you're the only user, you don't have to worry much about others mucking it up, and it adds a few basic features over a text file like sorting. Then if you later need to graduate to something RDBMS-backed, you would likely have a feasible import path. I just know that for me, when working by myself, I don't tend to get around to putting bugs in anything that requires more care and feeding than that (of course when working with others the collaborative needs make a more defined repository a requirement, but that's a different story).

EDIT: After noting the availability of free, hosted access to FogBugz, I'm re-thinking the bar for care and feeding...

Answer 9

RT from BestPractical is great.

I also get a lot of mileage out of just keeping a list of items in a text file with vi, if I can express them all in one line. This is usually for many small todo items on a single component or task.

Answer 10

I would suggest Omnigroup's Omnifocus - it's an excellent task tracker, and if you just make the mental leap from bug to task, I think it works famously for one man projects as well as being an excellent way to organize your no doubt burgeoning task queue.

Answer 11

I've tried bugtracker.net and even though it's a little bit rough on the edges, it's free and was built with ASP.NET:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=66812

Answer 12

I dig ELOG in those cases, it's more of a personal blog, but it's easy to handle and install, the data is local on your computer and you can search all entries via fulltext. Always sufficed for me.

Answer 13

Ontime 2008 by Axosoft is free for a single user licence. It's industrial strength and will give you alot more that just bug tracking!

http://www.axosoft.com

Answer 14

I don't think you need a full blown bugtracker for your scenario.

Try tiddly wiki, store each bug in a tiddler and give them tags like 'open' or 'closed'.

There is no installation required (only one html file), and it's very easy to use. And platform neutral.

Answer 15

I'm the author of BugTracker.NET mentioned in another post. If I were looking for a tracker for JUST ONE PERSON with MINIMUM hassle, I'd use FogBugz, because it's hosted. No installation, no need to worry about backups.

But, what are you doing about version control? Don't you have to worry about that too, and backing that up? If so, consider something like Unfuddle or CVSDude where you can get BOTH Subversion and Trac, or Subversion and Fogbugz.

Answer 16

Jira which now has free personal licenses.

Answer 17

Are you using a source control repository as well? If not, you really should, even though you're only a one-man team.

My personal preference is to use a VMWare Virutal Application (free) that offers no-hassle setup gives you access to both Trac and Subversion. You can find many different virual appliances through searching. Here is one example of getting a Trac/SVN virtual appliance up and running:

http://www.rungeek.com/blog/archives/how-to-setup-svn-and-trac-with-a-virtual-appliance/

Trac is an excellent project management tool that sports a bug tracker, wiki, and integrated source control management. It's adaptable to your needs, and fits me very well personally.

Answer 18

I use bugzilla for this purpose. Plus for me was that it has integration with Eclipse (precisely with Mylyn). FogBuzz has it to but AFAIK it is nonfree.

Plus it sits on my laptop so I can code and add/remove bugs when offline (it was biggest disadvantage of hosted solutions for me)

Installation was not a problem in Ubuntu (and any debian-based distro I suppose).

Answer 19

Take a look at TeamSupport.com. It's free for the first three users and handles both bug tracking and customer support help-desk duties.

We've been pretty impressed with it.

Answer 20

I am using leo for this purpose. To be more specific, its cleo plugin.

Of course you might need to spend some time to get used to leo, but it will pay off.

A flat text file is just a list, an Excel spreadsheet is a two-dimensional list.

leo lets you keep the data in a tree! And it also has clones.

Answer 21

Eclipse has a really interesting system--I don't know why so few people seem to know about it.

It's tied in with their to-do list. It gives you the ability to enter bugs with as much or as little info as you like. You can tie it to versioning or an external bug tracker if you like. It's a decent bug tracker in itself.

The real trick is how it works with your source code.

Before you begin work you select a bug from the list. All the time you're coding, it tracks what files you are editing. It can close old tabs for you, and will also highlight areas of the source tree that you have modified a lot.

The nice thing is, you can go back to any bug you've edited an you will get your "Environment" back. Not only all your notes and stuff, but the same tabs will open up and the same sections of code in the navigator will be highlighted.

Also eclipse works with virtually any language, it's not just restricted to Java...

Answer 22

let me put in a good word for ditz - it's a bit bare-bones, but it has the invaluable feature that bugs are checked into your repository. it's also very easy to use once you get used to its way of doing things

Answer 23

If you work in Visual Studio then Artifacts might be handy - just keep your bugs in the same version control as the source code.