Open-source trouble ticket systems

[blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

John Abreau wrote:
> I really like Request Tracker; I've been using it since 2000, and I've
> been very satisfied with it.

I've been using RT heavily for only a couple of years, and having used
BugZilla for many years, I found RT lacking in several areas.

I think RT excels as a general purpose ticketing system, particularly if
you want strong email integration. But when it comes to specifically
tracking software development, I find that RT is perhaps a generation
behind the curve.

For example, RT lacks a bunch of fields that are commonly found in
software bug reports. They can be added, but its up to you to do that.
The workflow process (the stages a ticket goes through) it provides is
less ideal for software development (but again, can somewhat be
customized). And then there are a bunch of little annoyances for
software projects, such as the way it collapses white space in postings,
thus trashing formatted code fragments. Also, unlike BugZilla, it
doesn't automatically hyperlink references to other tickets (bugs).

Despite this, I wouldn't necessarily jump to BugZilla for my next
project. After years of using these systems it has become apparent that 
what you really want in a ticketing system is a combination of project 
management features (as it's common these days to track all development 
tasks, not just bugs, using tickets), document management features (wiki 
area for the bug description or specification), discussion (per-ticket 
and project wide), notifications (both email and RSS), and version 
control integration.

Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) has been mentioned numerous times on 
this list. On paper it seems to come close to meeting the above 
requirements, but I've only had superficial exposure to it so far.


Bill Horne wrote:
> If I read the page correctly, RT won't run under Windows...

Given that it is written in Perl, I'd be surprised if it couldn't. It 
may need some additional software added to the machine, like a mail 
transport. I'm sure the link someone posted has more details.


> ...I'd like to know which open-source ticketing systems have been
> deployed the longest and which ones have the largest user base...

Both RT and BugZilla are among the oldest open source issue tracking 
programs available. They probably both date back to the late 90's if not 
earlier.

Given that RT is more general purpose, I'd guess it might have wider 
adoption among corporations, and perhaps a higher number of 
installations, but I'd bet there are more people with BugZilla logins, 
given its frequent use on popular open source projects.


> Off the top of my head, in addition to the usual
> who/what/when/why/where I'd like to have:
> 
> * Quoted resolution date/time
> * Expected resolution date/time

What's the difference between these? The developer's opinion vs. the 
project manager's opinion?


> * Duration since start of incident
>  * Hours
>  * Business Hours

One of the annoyances with RT is that times are tracked in minutes. Not 
hours and minutes - just minutes. This gets even more annoying if you're 
working on a scale of days.

Neither RT or Bugzilla have a running clock since the incident was 
reported, that I'm aware of (certainly not taking into account business 
hours), but they both track the date the incident was reported, and I 
think both will show the number of days old an incident is in some reports.

Both tools are fairly weak on some of these project management features.


> * Duration since last callback
> * Historical info for customer
>   * Number of incidents
>  * Average time tickets were open
>  * Average Technician/Engineer time per incident
>  * Average cost to repair
>  * Duration since last incident

I'm not aware of either tool providing canned reports for any of these 
metrics, though some can be easily obtained by running queries through 
the standard query UI. Others would require writing some custom code.


> Of course, I'd like management screens:
> 
> * Number of tickets open
> * Highest duration
> * Average duration past 24/48/settable (rolling)
> * Tickets over n hours
> * Tickets for top 5/50/settable customers

While number of tickets open is easily obtained, as is tickets per 
developer, project, component, etc. I think you'll find the others are 
less easy to extract from BugZilla and RT. Both tools seem to focus more 
on usability from the perspective of the individual developer, and have 
less to offer for the project manager looking to gather aggregate 
statistics.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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