I need a free and simple bug tracking system, suggestions?

Question

We have 2 systems at work that we pay for and we don't use and I don't know why, and at the moment we're using spreadsheets and let's just say it's not the greatest solution. So I'm going go to a little rogue and set a bugtracking system up in my dev environment and try and make people use it at least on my projects.

Any suggestions? Gotta be free, something that can run on an iplanet webserver (so cgis are best) and is really simple. Bugzilla is too complex. Something as easy to use as wordpress would be ideal. I'm tempted to use a wiki or wordpress simply because it's less worse than a spreadsheet, but a real bug tracking system would be best.

Some of you are going to suggest "why aren't you using one of your two existing systems?" and "if you're not using your existing systems you're not going to use a new one."

That may be true, but that doesn't help me. Any suggestions for something easy to set up and easy to figure out and use? The goal is to have as close to zero learning curve as possible so as to get it adopted more quickly and easily.

Answer 1

Have you looked at Trac yet? It's generally very simple to use and has most of the features of a real bug-tracking system. You can use it for free for up to 5 users.

Answer 2

JIRA is $10 for a limited time (for 10 users) http://www.atlassian.com/starter/

Trac is free and excellent http://trac.edgewall.org/

Unfuddle is hosted (but free) http://unfuddle.com/

Answer 3

A spreadsheet is better than a wiki or wordpress. At least a spreadsheet can have a "Status" column!

Bugzilla is highly configurable, and you can hide much of the complexity from your users.

That having been said, Trac is also a pretty nice simple solution. I have no idea if it runs on iplanet. Also, it's not so terribly easy to set up, unfortunately.

Also, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/101774/what-is-your-bug-task-tracking-tool

Answer 4

I use Trac at the office with many non technical users that report errors to me. They instantly learned how to work with it. And I as a developer can use the full functionality like SVN synchronisation and Mylyn integration into Apatana (Eclipse).

The setup is quite easy, if you have a linux server that already has python activated. Just install it using easy_install as explained here: http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracInstall#Usingeasy_install

I set up a multi project trac without being a python user or a linux pro. If you have any problem setting it up, just ask us.

Answer 5

If you use Subversion for source code then you can use Artifacts.