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Comment by lukeck | Hacker News Reader

Jira.

Surprised its not on there. FWIW here's a list of major issue trackers from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_sy....

Any guesses as to how Jira got left off? In my exp it's one of the most popular issue trackers & integrates with other PM tools.

I'll tell you exactly how it got left off.

I've just never heard of it.

Do most HN readers have the impression that polls like this are made by some some all-knowing, perfectly fair, professional editor who only puts up well researched, carefully thought out, scientific and objective options in their polls?

It might surprise you, but I'm just another HN reader just like yourself.

I woke up today and thought, "Hey, I'd like to know what other HN readers consider good bugtrackers. Why don't I put up a poll?"

I remembered the names of a few of bugtrackers off the top of my head, but just having a few would make for a pretty lame poll. So I pulled up the wikipedia article on the comparison of bug trackers. It had a million listed, so I thought that might make for too long a poll. So I chose the ones I personally heard of, and added an "Other" category for the rest.

I hope that clears up some of the mystery.

That's fair, and you're right this is a community forum where we learn from each other. For example, just yesterday I learned about akka for the first time even though I've been writing event-driven Java and searching google for it (or something like it) for years.

One reason why I found JIRA's omission so surprising is it's widely used by companies that have different departments or roles. It typically becomes the default choice when a company gets large enough to have a PM. Github doesn't scale with roles (yet). JIRA is so common, I'm curious what part of our industry you hang out in to know what growth Atlassian still has :) You probably use tools everyday that I'm also unfamiliar with -- we simply have different experiences.

Disclaimer: Atlassian is about to go public... so I've been doing my research on whether to buy.

Makes me wonder how some polls would turn out if options had both upvote and downvote buttons. I have used every bug tracker in this poll, as well as a few more (redmine, Assembla, GNATS, OTRS, Roundup, ikiwiki, various custom internal tools), and Jira was by far the second worst (behind one of the custom one-offs).

I'm surprised. Our company evaluated several bugtrackers and jira was by far the best. We're still using it two years later and still quite happy with it.

Jira seems like the kind of system sold to managers and then inflicted on engineers. Managers love it because, like Excel, it's the kind of tool that lets you easily generate reports and enforce workflows without programming. (And in fairness, that can be a major selling point.) However, from an engineering perspective, it makes simple tasks clunky; it turns what should be 1-2 step processes into 5-step processes, and otherwise manages to be the antithesis of a lightweight tracking tool. The phrase "makes the difficult things easy and the easy things difficult" (or "painful") comes to mind. In particular, the tasks it makes difficult/painful are the ones that engineers find themselves doing 30 times a day.

And for agile/scrum, Greenhopper is absurdly bad, for the same reason.

Being one of the engineers actually using it on a daily basis, all I can say is: I don't know why you have the impression that that is the way you need to use the product in practice, but that certainly doesn't match our experience. We hardly use the workflow and reporting components and you really don't need to, to make good use of it. And we're quite happy with Greenhopper as well. It's far from perfect, but Greenhopper is useful to us, where all other project planner / issue tracker crossovers were found to be borderline useless for our use cases.

I didn't have a very high opinion of Jira until about version 4. In recent updates, a lot of the clunkiness of older versions seems to have been cleaned up.

Until recently, my team was the only developer group in our company using an issue tracker. Management have decided that every team must now use an issue tracker and that tracker must be HP Quality Center. They're even paying a temp to manually migrate all our Jira issues into QC. We managed to win the battle for Git over IBM Rational ClearCase for a version control system but this kind of thing makes me think it's about time to find a new job.

Depends on the situation, and how it is being used. It does take a serious amount of time to set up, but it is so flexible that if you take the time, you will never leave it. It also integrates into everything, and has a very verbose API, so if it doesnt do what you want you can extend it.

Was thinking the same exact thing except if you look at the ones listed, it looks like this is a list of free trackers. Maybe the OP should've added that important tidbit in the title.

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