Disclaimer: I'm the lead developer of the bug genie ( http://www.thebuggenie.com), which was marked for consideration last time this issue was discussed. This is also one of the main reasons I'm following this thread.
I don't think you'll ever find a finished bug-/issue-tracking solution that caters just as well for newbies and developers. The main reason is (of course?) that most issue tracking software is written for developers, by developers with little or no experience or thought as to what makes a good end-user experience. Also, most issue tracking tools are *made deliberately* to work best for developers - with human (end-user) interaction kept to a minimum. That's also why most issue tracking solutions end up looking like glorified (not the good kind) spreadsheets (Mantis, Flyspray, others?), something the IRS would want you to fill out (BZ, OTRS, RT, others?), or some kind of bastard child in-between (The Bug Genie, Redmine, Jira, Fogbugz, others?).
Each of those approaches have their strengths, but unless you want to build something like getsatisfaction.com - trying to be both completely non-technical for non-technical users ("This issue makes me sad"), and at the same time try to give power-users or developers good tools - then you're gonna have to just figure out which issue tracking solution sucks least, and then go with that. There's only so much styling can do to hide the techie stuff from non-techie users, but you also don't want to hide all the techie stuff away so your developers are dumbed down. It's a hard line to find, and I think neither we, Mantis, BZ or any others really "do it right". Some issue tracking systems will want to keep a strong focus on the user experience for both non-techie users as well as developers, whereas others really don't care that much. Licensing issues aside, it's a tricky issue to find the right balance - in the end, you'll probably end up figuring good old BZ does the trick - and if it's the solution that sucks the least for you, then that's the one to go with.
All developers probably have their pet issue tracking system(s), and can go on and on about the wonders of it. I could go on and on about why TBG is a really good solution - but just saying "TBG is great, we (you) should all use that" really doesn't show much insight.
I hope I can contribute something to the discussion - I certainly know what TBG's strengths are, at least in relation to the WMF - where it would be a good fit and where it would be a bad fit.
Regards, Daniel André Eikeland
On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 8:45 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, MantisBT is localised at translatewiki.net. Given that we are talking about software to be used by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is a VERY important consideration. It beats hands down other software like MathJax that is considered to be usable and is not ieven internationalised. Thanks, GerardM
On 12 May 2012 18:17, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Discussion on Oliver Keyes' blog:
http://quominus.org/archives/714
He's coming from the perspective of liaison with newbies. Read the comments.
(I will note that Antoine Musso was right in the previous discussion that Mantis has a nice, friendly interface. I myself was most displeased to discover that (a) the code itself is really horrible (b) it's all but unsupported even to free-software standards.)
- d.
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