We need an issue tracking system that is more project based

It’s hard to imagine that a big company as we are, we don’t have any issue tracking for software projects. We do have Microsoft Excel and OneNote, but we all know they are not project-centered and there is no place to keep the discussion history.

For ages, we have an internal tool which is used to track issues found in testing on formal release builds. Super slow performance aside, the system serves its purpose of identifying a specific build and describing the issue. There are stages to solve an issue, and managers depend on the stage to monitor how a specific build is free of known issues.

Note I said ‘free of known issues’ instead of ‘finished with according to test plan’ or even ‘completed in development/delivery plan’. The system simply has no idea what’s in your development or test plan. Would you feel safe driving a car shipped with just a few known issues, but no one is tracking properly what are supposed to be designed or tested?

As a development team, we need a tracking system which starts with a software project, with all features listed, and track if they are all completed first development and then test, in the end. From time to time, we need to report and track issues based on target builds, as no one knows what the cause of that crash is yet. But we should usually work under project, implement this feature, test according some plan, or fixing bugs for that feature.

Now you can see the duality here. We need a system which can track status of plain issues, and also provide structure for planned features and milestones. It would be better if we have links among internal documentation, and code changes, and there are systems like that. However, that’s a bit too much for a weekend’s project.

For this purpose, I chose Mantis. This is a popular issue tracking system which I have used when I was in the software engineering program. We have used FogBugz, yeah, interesting name, ClearQuest and heavily customized Bugzilla in my previous job. All kind of famous and powerful, but not what I can setup in a weekend.
I linked it to our internal SMTP server so it sends email on issue status change, and even linked to our LDAP system so it authenticates using the same credential, but later dropped it because of security concerns.

I asked around and learnt our hardware department just started using ClearCase and ClearQuest, IC design is actually more closer to software design than most people would think these days. That’s really weird because we software teams are on Perforce but hardware teams switched from cvs to ClearCase. Maintaining yet another huge system takes time and money, especially when ClearCase is showing its age now. I know some guy who worked for Rational, the company created ClearCase. Guess what his team was using internally for revision control…