Zoho BugTracker : Issue Management and Bug Tracking For Small Business
BugTracker is California-based development firm ZOHO Software’s web-based bug and issue management system. It seems to have been designed specifically to reduce the unproductive down-time that often seems to be part and parcel of being on the managing and coding ends of software development projects. BugTracker’s raison d’être consists in increasing productivity by easing the functional workload of bug tracking and issue management by way of implementing easy-to-use, intuitive management tools that give the whole development team a clear sense of where their project stands at any given point in time. The tools BugTracker uses were clearly designed with ease of use in mind. They work in concert to streamline the whole trajectory of a project, focusing strongly on facilitating communication between users themselves and between managers and users.
These tools are built around the following six feature pillars:
- The ability to create customizable and automate-able working rules,
- Simplification of bug organization and tracking,
- Integration of user file-sharing,
- Inclusion of a dashboard interface for tracking project progress,
- User forums,
- And (really excellent) GitHub integration.
By focusing on user collaboration and simplicity in both design and use, BugTracker promises to be among the smartest of tools available to software development managers at small and medium sized development firms who are looking to increase their effective work time, decrease their work-induced stress level, and make their users and customers happier in the process. I say this for a number of reasons, each of which will be expounded upon in what follows. Overall though, BugTracker is highly customizable, offers innovative methods of integrating new workflows and workflow management with some of the most powerful development tools that already exist.
Customize and Automate Working Rules
BugTracker’s strengths are first obvious within its customization options, which give developers the ability to create and edit automated workflows, consisting of discrete rule-based steps and transitions. Workflows can be assigned to individual projects, or you can work from a library of business rules. These rules can include email notifications that trigger when a bug is noticed, assigned to be handled, classified, etc. You can even set rules around custom fields, giving you the flexibility to troubleshoot how you see fit, though the built-in bug classification and multi-tiered severity configuration options are already powerful tools around which you can set your business rules and workflows. That said, it’s easy to see how integrating, e.g., a “user-generated” field might help figure out where something is going wrong for some counterintuitive problems, and automatic classification of bugs by type and delegation of responsibilities moving forward lets you keep your attention where it is most needed: the forest, not the trees.
Track Bug Progress and Organize
The impact of BugTracker’s customization options carries through strongly in to its management and tracking features. ZOHO simplifies managing the debugging process by unifying oversight tools within the Bugs View information panel, which integrates your custom organization options in with other view option fields, such as bug severity, report origin, and current status. The Bugs View panel also brings task tools into the management process. You can make sure that your developers don’t drop the ball by observing progress on all current improvements, as well as keeping a record of milestones – including deadlines – that makes sure that you always stay right on schedule. With integrated exporting, you can even generate XLS or CSV progress reports from here, making it easy to keep the whole development team, including your customers, in the know.
File Sharing
BugTracker serves as a central file sharing library for a wide variety of document types, like .doc, .ppt, .zip, and .jpg files, eliminating much non-productive organizational work from the management process. With Google Docs integration for sending and receiving attachments, you also have the option of working right from within your browser instead of downloading and having to organize a large number of files locally. Versioning is fully supported, so user groups and developers can be notified when new documents are uploaded, or when existing documents have been edited. You can even generate and disseminate info-graphics right from BugTracker’s web interface.
Bugs Dashboard
Dashboard is BugTracker’s centralizing optimization, offering a simple visual interface to convey information about a large number of management tasks within your projects. The Latest Activities tab reads like any other updating feed, except that in lieu of over-saturated and confusing jumbles of contextless information, each entry is categorized and marked with color-coded headers, giving you an easy to assess, up to the minute lay of the land. Users can update the status of their projects with the ease of typing out a couple sentences, share those updates with other members of their development teams, and you can watch as their collaboration creates and maintains forward momentum. Dashboard also includes information about the most recent conversations between users, keeps everyone apprised of upcoming deadlines, and reproduces bug data project-wide in a simple, visually effective and clean interface that includes dates and times of reports and other actions.
User Discussion Forums
Discussion Forums within BugTracker uses topic-driven community tools to give your users an easy way to interact with each other as they tackle whatever issues they might face. New topics can be created and then commented upon, files (including uploads and links) can be attached to any forum topic with ease, topic importance can be marked with stickies, and BugTracker makes thread maintenance very straightforward, with easy nesting and folder creation options.
GitHub Integration
GitHub integration in BugTracker is one of the most important and powerful features of this software. GitHub offers simple but effective versioning tools, ideal for project environments that rely on multiple developers (especially if they don’t happen to be geographically proximate!). GitHub works by allowing users to create document and change-tracking repositories, which function as a primary code library which from users can “check out” code they are working on. BugTracker integrates GitHub’s code-summary analysis tools for sub-versioning, tracking, and collaboration features in to the overall set of BugTracker’s tools by using service hooks based on Project IDs and tokens.
This allows you to attach your project to its GitHub repository, and allows the two to share information both ways. This means that you can view all commits checked-in on GitHub from within BugTracker, and all check-in and update information made within BugTracker is automatically propagated back to GitHub. When GitHub records a change to the source code, BugTracker then represents that change as a changeset, and you can see a feed of commits, changesets and other updates to the status of your code as they happen. This lets you stay on top of changes in the project’s code in coordination with the information in your project’s GitHub’s repository.
Pricing of BugTracker
BugTracker offers three service levels: Express, Premium, and Enterprise. Each service level includes the features of the previous level, and also adds a few premium features. Express comes in at $40 per month, and lets you manage up to 20 projects, with an unlimited number of users and 5 GB of storage. Express also includes the ability to add bugs by email, and to create and use notifications and custom views. Premium costs $60 per month, let’s your work on up to 50 projects at a time, increases storage space to 15 GB, and adds the Business Rules and GitHub integration features. Enterprise tops the list at $80 per month, and gives you unlimited projects, increases online storage space to 30 GB, and give you access to the custom fields option.
Conclusion
Zoho BugTracker would be a fantastically powerful tool for any small business to keep in their pocket. Effective and clean bug tracking is forever a thorn in many development teams’ respective sides. If you feel like you spend your time delegating tasks that should have been handled already instead of moving your projects forward, or if your developers and managers are mired in redundant and unclear project goals or goal tracking, BugTracker comes very, very highly recommended. The service is reasonably priced for the range of features it offers, boasts of secure storage for all of your project’s and users’ information, and is innovative, easy to use, and (most importantly) actually focuses you and your development team more effective at what you do best – develop software.
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