As we expanded our portfolio, number of testers and bug reports in our company increased greatly. Sometimes they would send me bug reports on email, sometimes over IM or in person on coffee break and so on. We were never too formal and I always enjoyed relaxed atmosphere but enough is enough. If somebody asked us who’s taking care of some issue he would get the answer only if directly involved programmer was around, otherwise nobody even knew about the issue – it was between user or tester and one programmer.

And it is of great importance for project to be successful that everybody knows what others are doing and what are their priorities. You can’t say it’s not my problem, you must say its Mario’s or John’s problem. Also, looking through your list of issues it’s much easier to arrange your priorities and be more effective.

So I went hunting for a bug tracker tool. It looks like there is tool for every pocket and server. PHP – Apache – MySql combination is prevailing in free open source field. Commercial and freeware tools all look the same in general and cover all the same functionality in different ways. In the end, somehow I discovered this little gem called BugTracker.NET. If I had time to write such a project I would probably wrote it this way. It’s free and open source, configurable to the smallest details without recompiling and works on IIS and SQL database, it’s written in ASP.NET and it’s easy to read. I fell in love immediately.

In one evening I’ve set up BugTracker.NET for all our projects and for all our testers. I renamed it to Issue tracker and in a week, everybody had BugTracker.NET as main reference for project status. Generating project reports and estimating programmer’s workload was never easier. Bugs, task and features all found a place in this tool and using bugtracker’s email notifications has done more for my mailbox then Thunderbird when I migrated from Outlook express: it was finally useful.

As author put it: Bugtraker.NET is poor-man’s FogBUGZ. I say it’s not about the money, it’s about simplicity.

BugTracker.NET home page

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