Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Michael Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>]

On Mar 5, 2007, at 8:23 PM, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:

> My own dislike for JIRA is that it has a somewhat cumbersome and heavy
> UI for
> my taste and is not as easily skinned as other things.  We use  
> bugzilla
> which if
> you look we skinned nicely: http://buni.org/bugzilla/ and is light
> weight.  Granted
> it is kinda primitive by comparison.  The skinning thing is really
> important to me as
> I think it is cheesy when you send customer (or even non-customer)  
> to a
> site with
> 12 UI themes.  Less important internally.

The UI customization is Jira's week point. You've got to practically  
edit the JSP code by hand to wrap an existing site around it, which I  
did for years until I just gave up and customized the header.  Our  
support site is at http://support.webperformance.com

I did try and install Bugzilla years ago, but it was a complete mess  
to say the least, no installer, very little documentation, a  
ridiculous GUI, and few features to speak of. Its probably completely  
changed, as this was around 2000 or so.

For a department or small business scalability isn't that important,  
as we never have that many people at a time accessing it compared to  
the number of people filing bugs on a large OS project.  The area in  
which Jira shines is in managing employees and releases.  It has  
extensive reporting and searching, (love the saved filters) with a  
particular emphasis on reports to help manage projects. And it  
integrates well with customer emails, which fewer and fewer bug  
reporting systems do these days.  Thanks to the external API we were  
able to easily integrate access to the system from our product, so  
that customers asking for help can automatically include data from  
the program.

Note, Jira is not bug-free, and there are a few features we would  
like to be added, but it works well for us at least. I'd be surprised  
if it worked for everyone; that's why there's dozens of bug tracking  
systems out there.

________________________________________________________________________ 
_________
I used to read, but it's faster to just make up stuff. -- Wally
        -- michael at czeiszperger dot org, Chapel Hill, NC