On Trac
One of the most important things in testing is keeping track of the defects you find. That way, everything is in one in place, and you can easily pass issues back and forth. This week I’ve been evaluating Trac and I have to say that I’m impressed, and I haven’t gotten to all the functionality yet.
Trac is a combination wiki, defect tracker, and svn watcher. I’ve setup and used wikis and Bugzilla before, but the combination is really quite ingenious– you can have a wiki-link from inside an issue summary or in a case. That wiki link could be to anything — more detailed docs, a setup document. I didn’t mess with the wiki very much or the svn watcher (because our svn respository isn’t up yet) but I spent a lot of time with the ticketing system (i.e. defect tracker).
I’ve setup and used Bugzilla before. And it’s nice, but building a query can be overwelming and you can’t build your own reports. Adding custom fields is a pain as well. But Trac makes all of this easy. You can build reports going against their database, even though they are deprecating it. Too bad — I understand the reason, but I was able to build reports with it that I couldn’t do with the query module. Oh yeah, the query module – it’s what they recommend to use now. You choose new filters and it just drops down. Pretty easy to build an ad-hoc query, and you can easily create links to save your query.
Make custom fields is the easiest part — you just put them in the trac.ini file and Trac loads them automagically. You can make them drop-downs or text fields, etc., depending on how you put it in the .ini file. So if you are thinking about getting a tracking system setup, you really should give it a look.