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I spent a lot of time recently reading about debugging. One of the aspects that was continually referenced was not just a bug-tracking system, but a bug-solving process. I read about people writing down takes on the problem(that did or didn't work), tests that would determine if a given take on the fix would work or not, etc.
So I am thinking, "hey, this is a good idea"
I use Mantis right now, and it doesn't seem to have that capability(without abusing its fields). Mantis works great as a bug logger. But I'm looking for something more sophisticated in interface, I think.
Example
Suppose my bug was "Pants fall off". Then I want to log this information as...
"Pants fall off; Feb 32, 2009, 25:61; when I walked into a room, my pants fell off!"
Developer 1...
Hypothesis 1: Pants too big.
Test 1:Put on a belt.
Possible Solution 1: Buy a belt.
Result = ?? Result ???
Test 2: Put on your kid sister's pants.
Possible Solution 2: Steal into her room and take all her pants while she's at school!
Result = ??, date/time = ???
Developer 2...
Hypothesis 2: Your pants have holes in them.
Test 1: Shine a light on them.
Possibile Solution: Buy new pants.
Result = ???, date/time = ???
Now, this is a silly example. But I think it would be great to have as a software tool.
Does such exist, and if so, what's it called?
Trust me: you really don't want to maintain your bugs, that's why you don't find "Bug Maintenance Systems" :-)
Sorry... couldn't resist. Regarding the actual content of your question: I personally just keep track of all that information in the comment history of the ticket. Mostly I use trac for its simplicity, but also the capability to link into sources if required (at least on the file level, I wish it would grok code so you can point into the AST).
You could use Testopia, which is an extension of Bugzilla. This, of course, would also mean you would need to use Bugzilla.
Taken from the Testopia website:
Testopia is a test case management extension for Bugzilla. It is designed to be a generic tool for tracking test cases, allowing for testing organizations to integrate bug reporting with their test case run results. Though it is designed with software testing in mind, it can be used to track testing on virtually anything in the engineering process.
We also use Mantis, and like Peter Becker describes, we use the comments to describe the work on a bug. This usually works, because most bugs don't have such a long history.
If work on a bug becomes so complex it needs its own meetings and meeting notes, we usually create a task in our main work planning system and do the discussion there (linking from Mantis). That at least works for us.
At any rate, I'd be wary of a system that tries to explicitly support a certain workflow, as these also tend to lock you into the workflow they expect. An in bughunting, the workflow can vary a lot from bug to bug...
Finally, note that Mantis also lets you edit your comments. So you can change old comments to avoid cluttering the bug report.
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I know slightly close questions have been asked before but this question is a bit different.
We are a start-up company with a very limited budget and we are looking for a completely free Agile software development process tool without any limitation on the number of users. We don't want to have a limitation for the number of users because there could be a lot of people who would do small tasks for us and if they pass the number of user limit all of a sudden we'll have to pay a lot of money for the tool monthly.
It would be very useful if it could support:
Kanban board
Task hierarchy (so that you can define cards within cards)
Hosting the tool online (not download)
Commenting system
Different roles
Swimlanes
I have checked a lot of those tools here:
http://agilescout.com/best-agile-scrum-tools/
but I didn't find any that is absolutely free for unlimited users. Some of them also don't have a Kanban board. I checked Agilefant but its online version is going to be paid from 2014. I also checked Stackoverflow for this but none of the questions were targeting "completely free tools".
Your help will be greatly appreciated.
Trello.com Trello is free for unlimited users. Period.
You almost definitely don't need "Sub-cards". Use the checklists instead, or if you REALLY need sub-cards, don't have a parent sub-card. Just name the tickets something like "Epic - Story A" or "Story - task Z" or whatever.
Another idea is to create two boards (did I mention you can have unlimited boards for free too?). One for your epics and one for your stories. Call one your product management board and the other your sprint board, or whatever you like.
I'm not sure what you need different roles for - but, people aren't crazy - they know their job. As a startup if you already have problems getting people to not do crazy things (Where you need to restrict their permissions) you have much much bigger issues.
The point is that you need a SMALL tool to help you track stuff. Not a super rigid tool that makes you work in a super specific way. As a new (I assume?) startup, you should let your process grow into a tool. Don't beef up your process to fit a tool.
Back in 2010 we had the same problem and i successfully employed GoogleDocs with our small Agile Development team (8 Devs in 3 Countries).
GoogleDrawing will serve in the exact same way as a physical Scrum board would, with all the upsides of full flexibilty and also the downsides of zero automation but with the big additional upside of being virtual and accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
It also was used for the retrospective at the end of each Sprint
GoogleSpreadsheet was used for a concise list of all the tickets from our bug tracking system (Redmine, manually transfered) and also for the (manually updated, albeit with formulas to calculate the progress) burndown chart.
The combination of these different elements is actually quite powerful, as you have the full flexibility over the content and its representation and can have your team communicate via VoIP while all are looking at the same documents and can modify them in real-time.
Here an example of the docs used in a sprint (all sensitive data removed):
Scrum board Example (GoogleDrawing)
Retrospective Example (GoogleDrawing)
Burndown Chart Example (GoogleSheet, formulas to automate calculation)
Ticket list from Bugtracker (GoogleSheet)
As mentioned before, the only downside is the fact that you have to invest some time to maintain and prepare the data for each sprint, but for us that was hugely outweighed by the flexibility and accessibility that the Team of GoogleDocs + VoIP gave us.
You can check out https://kanbanflow.com
It's free for now because it's in beta and they say there is no time limit. It behaves very similar to AgileZen
I second the google doc, or you could use an online collaborative board that multiple people can edit.
Or you can host a more robust excel doc in skydrive from MS. I haven't tried that yet.
Mura.ly is another one that I am playing with currently. It has unlimited collaborators, though I think you would probably have to invite them everytime?? with a free account.
Hope that helps!
Try http://www.icescrum.org . It is free to use. And it has lot of cool features. Perfect for scrum teams.
EDIT: Kanbanize is a commercial product and offers a 30 day free trial.
Disclosing: I am a co-founder of http://kanbanize.com/
Mark, I understand your desire to find the perfect application with all these features inside, but I really doubt that you will get it for free. There's a bunch of super cool apps (including Kanbanize) out there, but none of them is completely free.
Be careful what you call a Kanban board and what not, though. Trello is definitely NOT a kanban system (no WIP limits, no analytics, etc.). It is a great visual management system, but not a Kanban one.
Finally, to answer your question, tools that deserve attention in my opinion are:
Kanbanize (of course), LeanKit, KanbanTool, Kanbanery and probably a few others. My personal bias is that LeanKit is the most advanced to date followed by Kanbanize and KanbanTool.
I hope that helps.
One possibility would be to use a Google Drawing, part of Google Drive, if you want a more visual and easy-to-edit option. You can create the cards by grouping a color-filled rectangle and one or more text fields together. Being a sufficiently free-form online vector drawing program, it doesn't really limit your possibilities like if you use a more dedicated solution.
The only real downsides are that you have to first create the building blocks from the beginning, and don't get numerical statistics like with a more structured tool.
Although, I'm a big fan of Kanban Tool service (it has everything you need except free of charge) and therefore it's difficult for me to stay objective, I think that should go for Trello or Kanban Flow. Both are free and both provide basic features that are essential for agile process managers and their teams.
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Anti-virus, malware, botnets and the like are becoming larger and larger parts of our daily lives. Are there any resources that discuss creating anti-virus tools, security tools and such? Seems like an interesting topic, but I have not been able to find any real source to refer to in order to learn more.
Suggestions? (Good and bad?)
I assume most languages used for this are C++ or assembly? Or are there others that work well for these sort of items?
Alex's suggestion of Bruce Schneier's work is excellent, and everyone should read his stuff, but probably won't address what you're talking about. Even so, you should read it. He's the clearest writer on security topics today, and a voice of sanity in an often hysterical industry.
A free place to start for the bare bones is the SANS reading room. It's far from enough, but it's the basics.
I was fairly pleased with The Shellcoder's Handbook. It's a good introduction with some practical code to work with. It shows how real exploits are written, which is the first step in understanding how to protect against them.
Exploit work is done in a variety of things, but for the classic stack-smashing attacks, you need to know C and the assembler of the target platform (generally Intel). C++ is much less common in this world. It's too twisty-turny by the time the compiler gets done with it, and too bloated for the kinds of things needed. Objective-C is almost more useful in my opinion so that you can understand Mac reverse engineering. But that isn't where security is usually done. In this I'm speaking of exploits themselves. Many security tools are of course written in C++.
For the security tools side, you probably want to ask on serverfault. There are many, and the SANS link above should have links to some of the common tools (Nessus, nmap, hping, metasploit and the like). sectools.org maintains a big list that I like.
If you're going to be a security developer, you need a lot of breadth and a lot of depth. You need to understand the network protocols as well as the code that talks to them. You should be reasonably comfortable in languages from assembler to ruby. Much of it is more a way of thinking than an actual skill set, but those who are good at it tend to have broad skills and pick up new things quickly and often.
Since you noted specifically detecting and monitoring for exploits, you should dig into tools like snort (for learning how to detect) and metasploit (for generating the attacks to detect).
go to http://www.milw0rm.com/ to see the exploits.
For a holistic view on security, anything by Bruce Schneier comes highly recommended -- not the threat-specific focus you have in mind, but a background that will make you more effective at security issues in whatever role you play, whatever background you have.
For more specific views, I would recommend this book (and just about every book I've looked at in depth in the same series, but I can't personally vouch for all of them, they're dozens!-).
As well as what Alex Martelli posted, this book might be something you can consider.
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I'm interested in evaluating bug trackers, but I wanted to back up and figure out what sorts of criteria were most important in bug software. So far things I've thought of include:
integration with source control
usability
basic features (email notifications, rss, case states)
customization
advanced features (reporting, visualizations)
stability
cost
IDE integration
Any ideas?
Ease of use
This should, in my opinion, be on the top of your list of features to evaluate against. You want inhouse developers and testers to take any and all things they notice in the software and plug it into the tool, even if they're currently working on something else. For this to happen, the tool must be so easy to use that it stays out of the way and just takes your data. The worst bugs are those you don't know about.
A tool that has 15+ fields on the screen, where 10+ are required in order to just be able to submit the issue, is not such a system. With such a system, you'll get postit notes from testers to developers about the little things.
When evaluating BugTracker X, which bugtracker do the developers of BugTracker X use?
customizable workflows (from "open" to "in work" to "resolved" to "closed")
fine granular access control
There was a recent thread on Hacker News about this exact question. Lots of good stuff in there!
An API. Mandatory.
You MUST be able to catch and automatically submit bugs into your bug tracker from applications running in the field.
(Copy/Pasted from "Lasse V. Karlsen"'s answer)
You want inhouse developers and testers to take any and all things they notice in the software and plug it into the tool, even if they're currently working on something else. For this to happen, the tool must be so easy to use that it stays out of the way and just takes your data. The worst bugs are those you don't know about.
Even good, conscientious testers, if they are focused on testing component A but happened to stumble on a bug in component B, might not actually enter that bug if there is a lot of friction in the bug tracker. Friction means, required fields. It's not that the testers are bad or lazy - it's just how the human mind works. We focus. We don't see the guy in the gorilla suit.
The Joel/FogBugz philosophy of NO required fields is the right one (Also the philosophy of my own BugTracker.NET). You almost always can gather the details later - what os, what version, what browser, etc.
Also, take a look at "Bug Shooting", if your app has a GUI. You want to make it as easy as possible for the testers to take a screenshot and get it into the bug tracker, and that's a great tool for it. Pick a tracker that works with Bug Shooting or has its own dedicated screen shot tool.
Distribution. My version control system is distributed, why shouldn't my bugtracker? If I fix a bug on the train, why should I be able to make the fix but not record it?
Probably everything mentioned by others, plus some from me.
If you have long term big project, separate testing team that will do functional tests, you should take few additional things into consideration:
- can bugs be linked to test cases (and more precisely to given run)?
- can defect tracking system exchange data with test management system?
- can it produce (useful) reports?
- can bugs be grouped by release?
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I found a lot of questions asking for the best tool, but none asking for the features, you really need? And what features you never really needed?
(I caught myself to be comparing tools on feature matrices. Something I hate, because in the end I will be using only the 3-4 most important features and leave the rest untouched.)
It need to:
collect bugs
order bugs on priority/severity/due date etc
assign bugs to developers
track a bug history
link similar bugs together
link bugs to customers
link solved bugs to releases
provide enough information or a reference to get the information to reproduce the bug
usable by more than one developer
bug status need to be accessible by the client that reported the bug.
And there are more.
Simple end user data entry. Without this you won't have bugs entered, which equals worthless bug tool.
I can't answer this question for you, because I can't predict what is important for you, or what your situation is:
Are you on a large or small development team, or are you a one-man shop?
Would it be useful to have a system in place where you could have your application automatically send in trouble reports that create incidents in your bug tracking software?
Is being able to predict a release schedule important, or is this just something for a side project you're doing in your spare time?
Is integration with source control important?
In reality, you're the only one who can answer what features are required for you.
Those are the 3 must-have features I find most important:
Web interface so people can follow-up
Source control integration, otherwise it's really hard to track who did what and deploy patches
Configurable workflow with email notifications
Things I would really like to see:
1) Voting - i.e. how many customers/users does this bug hurt?
2) Severity/priority/whatever - the distinction between these terms is subtle and normally (IMHO) insignificant, but you have to have some idea of how important the bug is. Most tools have this, but overcomplicate it.
3) Dependencies - both internal (on other bugs in the same system) and external (external libraries, software, etc). Most bugs have this in reality, but it's not normally expressible in the database, leading to long, pointless debates at triage time.
Things I think are largely pointless:
1) Any extensive questionnaires - any bug-tracker that asks too many questions will just get bad data. That's worse than none.
2) Controversial, but compulsory daily/weekly/whatever email notifications. They just get filed as spam/ignored/filtered out. If developers should be fixing bugs, and aren't, that's a management problem. Software cannot fix this.
Need:
Email notification.
Status
Group notify
Group rights
Web interface
Easy / fast interface
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There's not a lot to add to the subject really.
I am after a free task board/ burndown reporting tool for Windows.
If you're willing to host your tool,
TargetProcess
(http://www.targetprocess.com/)
XPlanner(http://xplanner.codehaus.org/)
If not,
Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/)
ScrumWorks (http://danube.com/scrumworks/basic)
All are either free or have a free version.
Depending on your real needs, solutions range from :
hand-written cards complemented with a manually drawn burndown chart as big visible chart as recommend by Ilja
spreadsheet-based list with automatic burndown graph generation (example)
online tools such as scrumy, scrumpad and skinnyboard
local application with web access
free ScrumWorks basic, Icescrum2
or commercial ScrumWorks Pro ProjectCards, or, as Eliza recommended, TargetProcess
Remember however the Agile manifesto is recommending to favor "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
I'd recommend starting small, perhaps with a spreadsheet if you insist on automatic burndown charting.
Check out SeeNowDo at www.seenowdo.com
It's a free online taskboard for distributed Agile teams. It's pretty cool and provides convenient features like 'always-on' and 'instant-sync' capability. It also has some cool ways of managing the taskboard layout once you have alot of tasks on it. Best of all, it's completely free.
Apparently I got to disclose I built this product
You might want to try: http://www.burndown-charts.com
It's a free webapp for managing burndown charts. You create a team and a sprint and you are ready to go. Enter your tasks once they are done. Perfect for when you still want to keep a board and/or post-its. You can add teammates to your team if you need.
You're not going to spend an hour figuring out how to use it.
That is exactly what Scrumy.com is. It is a whiteboard with sticky notes. The pro version has a burndown.
Try Mingle. It is free for upto 5 users.
Open Source app: http://taskboard.cognifide.com/
Fast, tidy tool :)
EDIT
Ok, we are working on something that does just what you asked and way more:
Actionable metrics
Powerful analytics
All this on a slick Dashboard
It's meant to eliminate the use of excel sheets to build your own reports by hand.
It's a far better solution and it is in beta right now.
Sign up and participate in the beta to make sure your features are well covered!
http://www.in-sight.io
Well, without knowing more about your situation, I have to highly recommend a wall of index cards and a handdrawn chart on flip chart paper. Works much better than any software in the standard situation.
If you really have to use software, there is none that I could recommend unreservedly, let alone a free one. You might want to keep in mind that some of the commercial ones are free for open source or academic projects, too. Which one's right for you will depend, besides other things, on how much you want it to define your process.
You might consider creating your own solution using a spreadsheet.
That way you get low overhead on data entry and as much reporting capabilities as you want, without having an external tool define your process.
Especially on single-person projects (as this appears to be from the comment on Ilja Preuß's answer), I find that a simple spreadsheet actually works better for me.
I keep all my tasks in one workbook, and the formulas that pull out interesting data and calculations in a separate workbook.
I made a basic plugin that can be inserted in google wave and be used as a taskboard. More details in http://agilebooknote.blogspot.com/2009/11/taskboardy-available.html.
Cheers,
-fede
I'm a fan of google docs because of the simplicity and also because I can give access to my team so that they can update their tasks on a daily basis. The template I use and a tutorial on how to use it is available at
Burn Down Chart Tutorial: Simple Agile Project Tracking
I know this is old thread, but I came across this question looking for something similar. I signed up for AgileZen (http://www.agilezen.com/) and it's actually quite good.
I wanted something free that my wife and I could use for personal/home stuff. It's free if you're willing to have only one project (I call it "Home") and one other collaborator (my wife). It's a pretty good solution for us.
I promise I have no affiliation with them! Except that I now use their product.
If your project is open source, non-profit or a classroom you can get free access to Atlassians' JIRA + Greenhopper (and other tools) for agile project management. Otherwise small teams can get access for a nominal fee.
see http://www.atlassian.com/software/greenhopper/overview and http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview.
See http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request if your an open source project.
http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/community-license-request if you are a non-profit
and
http://www.atlassian.com/survey/classroom-license-request if your a classroom.