Wednesday, March 3rd, 2004
A while back I made a post about how I needed a new bug reporting system- I had grown mine from scratch and it did a couple of neat tricks that I liked and had integrated into an auto-reporting system in VoodooPad for when things went wrong. But other than that it really sucked. I'll never write my own bug reporting system again unless I've got lots of free time to focus on it.
Mueller's Law of Best Tools: If you aren't using the best tools available for your job then you are wasting time and energy that could be spent on making your product better.
I know that's been said before by other folks many times, and I've always appreciated it- but over the past year I've learned to appreciate it even more. Updating the bug tracker wasn't a priority for me, but it was obvious it really needed some work. Marking bugs as "show stoppers", or giving them ranked priorities- or letting people vote for their favorite "wish list" items or bugs. Simple things like having long lists broken up over multiple pages- listing 350 feature requests for VoodooPad on one page is stupid. But I didn't want to have to focus on writing cgi scripts instead of working on VP.
Oh yea, the new toy. Jira is a badass bug/issue tracking app from Atlassian. It gets 2 thumbs up from me. It's got rss feeds, anonymous browsing, some sort of cvs integration (which I haven't tried yet), and my favorite- a "Blocker" priority you can give to bugs (I like the simple things). The only thing that I don't like about it is that you have to create an account to comment or create new bugs. I think I can live with it though :).
To help with the "anonymous problem" I've created a form that is similar to the old bug reporting system I wrote, which will send me an email with the relevant info & some xml tags that I can use to import right into Jira. Super spiffy.
So anyway- to boil down this post a bit, I've got a new bug system, and you can look at it here: http://flyingmeat.com/jira/. I'm not fully finished with the transition, but I'm sure I will be within the next couple of days. Then I can get back to work doing the things I should be doing.
-- posted 10:23 pm