We’ve been using Lighthouse here at Viewbook for a long time and switched to Jira in combination with Greenhopper recently. Mainly to get more into Scrum. When I started looking into issue trackers my basic wishlist was:
* Filter and sort on tickets with all sorts of criteria, mainly on assignee and status.
* Quick overview of tickets in different releases and projects and their status.
* Basic support of Scrum.
* Simple workflow.
* Easy to comment on tickets; large text fields and updates via email.
* Easy to use and to understand for team members.
Lighthouse
We’ve hosted an application at EngineYard in the past, and with it came free use of Lighthouse. A simple and easy to use issue tracker. No bells and whistles. It functioned great for us, the clean interface and simplicity and email notification made it a practical tool. However there are a couple of drawbacks that made me look for an alternative. Filtering tickets, by assignee, status and priority is not intuitive and it’s kind of hard to add new filters. Also getting release or project overviews is not that great, thus making it hard to support a methodology like Scrum.
Jira and Greenhopper
In my search for Scrum supported tools I came across Greenhopper that integrates seamlessly with Jira. With Atlassin’s ‘$10 Starter‘ offer it was a no brainer to check out both packages. Installation did not go very smoothly. The Java SDK simply did not finish to install on an Ubuntu system with 512MB memory. Upgraded the machine to 1024MB memory and all went fine. Initial configuration is a bit cumbersome and is done by adding and removing a couple of lines in XML files. Mainly configuring database properties (I’ve used Mysql as database). Then discovering all the options the software has to offer begins. And with Jira, thats’s a lot.
The flexibility and default workflow of Jira immediately fell in place. It simply feels more professional. The workflow is both simple and logical: Tickets have the following states: ‘new’, ‘open’, ‘resolved’ or ‘closed’. Closing is done by the project owner or tester when all works fine, or the ticket can be reopened when there’s still work to do. Of course you can change this but it works fine for us. We use subtasks to group issues together during testing that belong to a certain part of the software. When adding Greenhopper to Jira you get another option called ‘Agile’ which gives you scrum like overviews into your projects or releases. With a drag & drop interface that makes it very easy to move tickets into a next status.
Pivotal Tracker
We’ve never used Pivotal Tracker in production. But I’ve logged in many times to check and learn more about it. Purely as issue tracker (or bug tracker) Pivotal is not the most ideal solution to me. But as project tool, especially when doing Agile / Scrum, it looks great. It automatically prioritizes tickets depending on velocity and stuff that needs to be done, which is a great feature, but also can stand in the way for simple issue tracking.
Conclusion
So what tool to use for what job? When you’re a startup looking for a simple easy to use issue tracker, or you’re doing an Open Source project, Lighthouse is the tool to go for. If you need more flexibility, solid workflow and better overview, the industry leader Jira in combination with Greenhopper is your choice (and you get both for just $20!!! when you’re with a team of 10 or less). And finally if you’re heavily into agile development and focus on (different) projects a lot, Pivotal Tracker is what you should look into.
Jira is never the way to go, least of all if you’ve got an agile process. It’s very capable, but has a horribly bloated and poorly designed UI. If Lighthouse and Pivotal tracker don’t cut it, I recommend Redmine. It’s about as flexible as Jira, but a lot easier to use.
Comment by Marnen Laibow-Koser — September 27, 2011 @ 2:28 pm
Well, Jira with Greenhopper is very suitable for working Agile. Simple cards and overviews, we use it every day. I think Jira improved it’s UI a lot over the years, they even rebranded their website recently. Plus it offers a lot of powerful tools, integrations and plugins, like Jira Bonfire for testing. All in all it works very well for us, even for a relatively small team (around 10 developers). And we’re not the only ones…
Comment by Rien // Viewbook.com — November 28, 2011 @ 8:42 pm
The only problem with JIRA is the update process. Over the past couple years Atlassian has increased the amount of security patches they release (a good thing) and the process of updating an installation is not a button click. It’s a task that could take hours if not a full day of time.
That’s why we switched away from Atlassian products. We now use GitHub Issues and are looking at Pivotal.
Comment by Mike — November 29, 2011 @ 2:50 pm
@Mike, yes true it can be a pain. Messing around in XML files, etc, looking through documentation, etc. Maybe the hosted solution is something for people who don’t want to mess around.
Comment by Rien — November 29, 2011 @ 2:54 pm
I am using Jira/Greenhopper in the Company and I like it, but the administration is a pain in the ass. Ok, maybe a hosted version is the better choice if you don’t want to administrate the thing yourself, but it’s expensive.
I use Pivotal for private projects and also integrated it with Jira to try it for my day-work. It’s easy to use, but lacks flexibility like Jira offers it. But it’s dead-simple.
Comment by Daniel — December 2, 2011 @ 1:21 pm
@Rien: I’ve used Jira with Greenhopper for agile processes. I think, while the model is more or less suitable for agile development, the implementation flies in the face of agile principles by being needlessly complicated to use (as well as slow in most browsers). Jira is not simple or easy to use. Greenhopper doesn’t help matters in those respects at all. If you make your developers use Jira, then IMHO you’re essentially saying you don’t care about making your development process pleasant — which means your developers will go work for a company that *does* care.
@Daniel: Pivotal Tracker can certainly be inflexible (though it’s wonderful if you can live with its restrictions). That, plus the fact that I think Jira is a piece of garbage from a UI perspective, is why I recommend Redmine if Pivotal Tracker won’t do it for you.
Someday I hope to write an issue tracker that addresses all these issues.
Comment by Marnen Laibow-Koser — February 23, 2012 @ 11:57 pm
Wow that’s a big statement:
” … which means your developers will go work for a company that *does* care”.
Isn’t that a little exaggerated? I don’t think all those companies don’t care: http://www.atlassian.com/company/customers (Some of them don’t, maybe ;-))
Comment by Rien // Viewbook.com — February 24, 2012 @ 7:50 am
OK, maybe some of them don’t know there’s something better out there.
Fortunately, almost no one is using Jira in the Rails world now
If I found myself at a job where I was forced to use Jira, I’d either try to get them to switch, or I’d plan my exit strategy.
If you’re using your issue tracker properly, your developers will spend a lot of time working with it because it’s the central nervous system of the project. Continuing the analogy, Jira is that nervous system with a permanent hangover: technically functional, but slow, clumsy, and unpleasant. There is no reason to use it if one of its competitors will do the trick (hence my recommendation of a properly customized Redmine installation).
Comment by Marnen Laibow-Koser — March 16, 2012 @ 2:17 pm