I've been a fan of Joel Spolsky's writing (joelonsoftware) for a while, and am kind of in the market for a bug-tracking, task-assignment, timesheet program. His software seems to tick a bunch of boxes but I wondered if anyone here has used it and could share any thoughts? Right now I use a free Bugzilla service which is OK but not that feature-rich... but FogBugz is charged at $25 per month per user, which is not the cheapest software I've come across. Thanks.

I used it for a short while, to evaluate it. However, since we didn't want to commit to using it (since we would have to retrieve all the tickets if we decided we didn't want it) it was only a theoretical evaluation instead of an actual use.

As a whole, I found nothing groundbreaking. There are a lot of quite nice features and the UI is pretty well glued together. But the per-developer price was too steep compared to our self-hosted Mantis instance.

I currently use it at the company I work for. The hosted price is very high, but we went with hosting it on our own server which is quite a bit more reasonable ($200 / user) if you're going to use it long-term. The primary reason I decided on it is it tries to get out of your way as much as possible. It makes things very easy to do which eliminates a reason to not keep your tasks up to date. Before this I was using dotProject which doesn't quite target the same audience, but it has a bug tracking component to it and it's free, so you might want to check it out.

I've used it. I've nothing particularly good or bad to say about it -- it works, but it's hardly anything special or revolutionary. I dislike portions of its UI for the minor workflow annoyances they sometimes create, but it's simple and direct otherwise, so it's whatever.

I took a cursory look at their integration API and found it hugely lacking, though. Suggesting I hit the database directly and giving me a schema isn't the way to my heart.

Quote: Original post by jpetrie
Suggesting I hit the database directly and giving me a schema isn't the way to my heart.

As long as the database is fully documented and allows me to handle the entire spectrum of interaction I might want to do, then telling me to do that is the fastest way to my heart.

But maybe that's my experience with Magento's don't-touch-the-database-and-use-the-slower-than-snails-API philsophy speaking here.

Quote:
As long as the database is fully documented and allows me to handle the entire spectrum of interaction I might want to do

My concerns were that it was documented reasonably well, but it was hard for me to find information about changes since previous versions. The current version of the schema appears to be 632 (to go with the 6.0 database schema), and I was interested in the trend of revisions to see how much of my code might be broken by an upgrade. Also not finding an easy changelist suggested that when an upgrade occurred, I'd have a hard time of it.

Additionally, all the documentation explicitly called out that I was not to modify anything by interacting directly with the DB, which I understand to an extent, but that made the capability useless for my needs. This is why APIs are provided, so that I can do things without destabilizing the database, dammit.

The "API" itself for the version I was using could do nothing except log in, log out, and tell me the case list modified by the logged in users filter. Wholly useless. It has since gained new functionality, though, that make it suck less.

It just left a sour taste in my mouth.