I am looking for an issue tracking software for internal use in my company. I think our requirements can be summurized as following:
- issue can be a bug, a todo, a question or a request for enhancement. So this is not necessarily directly related to software.
- the status of the issue should be customisable or at least not too overwheelming. Bugzilla for example has too many status. Right now, we see only envision the following status: open, fixed, rejected, waiting on client.
- modifications to issues should fire a mail with the content of the modification and issue history.
- I need at least two and maximum three levels of classification for my products: product/version (two level) or product/component/version (three levels)
- Users should not have access to every products. Our clients should only see the bugs related to their products. So, I need some kind of access control on a per-product basis.
- issues have to be assignable
- It should be easy to sort and filter the issues by product, by assigned people, by version of the product.
Since we are a distributed group of people working from various places, including in the train to home, it is important to be able to deal with issues while offline. This brings two additional requirements:
- it would be nice to be able to submit issues by mail
- it would be nice to be able to follow the whole issue with only a mailer: replying to the issue will log the answer in the issue tracking software
To my surprise bugzilla is ruled out. It can only deals with software so there is no such thing as a 'question'. And it is not possible to simplify the interface and remove the 25 categories that can be assigned to a bug and the 38 ways of closing an issue. Moreover, the filtering capabilities are simply too complex to be used. In one sentence, it is not possible to turn bugzilla into a simple bug-tracking system. I deduce this from the doc and from all the websites using bugzilla. None of them has simplified it without a lot of efforts. I know that for KDE, it was not a simple task.
Right now, I am using issue-tracker but I can not say I am over-satisfied with it. It is not possible to filter the issues, only to sort them. With 7 issues in 7 categories, I have about 50 lines to analyse without any filter. I may miss some of them or spend too much time looking for one. Issue-tracker is supposed to support issue submission by mail but the administrator guide does not say anything about how to set it up. So it is not working for me. It is theorically possible to follow an issue by mail but the same problem for submitting the issue arises. Dunno how to configure that. Another problem is that mails that are sent when you modify an issue contain only a limited information, not the whole issue history. The software is obviously not written with disconnected people in mind. Apart from that, it is quite good. It was pretty easy to set it up, it is nicely configurable, it sends email when you modify something, there is an access control list for user actions.
So, I an looking for another candidate, if possible easy to install. Any suggestions ?