Issue Tracker Shopping

Scarab, as far as I am concerned, is certainly powerful, but also very complicated. Or at least not intuitive for me (JIRA is more intuitive I think). GForge is very simple but as far as issue tracking goes, just doesn’t have much in the way of reporting. Plus it’s difficult to get a “big picture” view in GForge—say, if a manager wants to see the top issues for ALL projects.

Others that we looked at or at least heard of include (commerical) JIRA, SourceForge Enterprise, CollabNet’s SourceCast, and (open source) ITracker, Tracker+, Trac and a dozen or so others that showed up in a sourceforge search. Trac really is cool and if there were a good way to set it up for multiple projects I’d try to use it. Right now it looks like its focuses on single project management but I like the wiki and svn integration.

Anyway, all of them seem to have most of the features we want, but none of them seem to have all the features we want in a simple to use package. I’ll probably put up a better review of the issue trackers later. Right now the quest is really just beginning…