Countersoft, the team behind the Gemini ALM and bug tracking tool, is becoming Ekso. The company's products focus on IT help desk, bug tracking, test management, and general ALM functionality.
Buzilla is easy to use and provides basic functionality to use as a bug tracking tool. If big size attachments are allowed it would have been great. Also with Bugzilla home->Test management area is improved by allowing multiple sections it would be awesome!
Gemini is well suited to help track issues and change requests, projects, bugs, time logs, etc. It is less appropriate for reporting needs or general office management needs.
Open source! No license fee involved, no limit to the number of licenses.
Easy to install and maintain. Installation is very easy and hardly needs any maintenance efforts, except when migrating from one version to other. Each project can have its own group of users.
Includes all the core features/fields that are needed to log a software bug/issue.
Multiple attachments are possible, supports various formats.
Good for reporting. Filtering mechanism lets you query bugs by various parameters.
Gemini offers flexible framework that allowed IT to build a workflow based process. IT change requests were divided into several buckets: New Change Requests group for business units to submit requests for enhancements and new project ideas, Pending Change Requests for approved projects that are waiting for IT resources, Application Development where we track active projects, Defect Tracking where bugs are tracked during testing and finally Release Management where requests for deployment are tracked.
Gemini allows to create custom fields and add them to View, Edit and Add screens. This flexible model allowed us to track additional information on the project such as IT Point of Contact, System Name, Team Name, Testing dates, etc.
Gemini has flexible email notification model that allows to keep business customers informed on the project progress. Whenever comment is added by project manager email alerts goes out anyone that is set to watch project progress.
Cloud Based. I'd like to see bugzilla be cloud based. The company I currently work with made a final decision to change db's for this specific reason. Due to the frequency of travel in this company, they need access to bugzilla from differing national / international locations.
Larger File Attachments. I believe the limit of a bugzilla content upload is 4 megabytes. For many of our video'd issues, this file size is simply impractical without the additional effort exertion on video compressor applications.
For future projects I will look at something that is hosted in the cloud that I don't have to manage. I would also like something that has a more modern feel to allow my customers to use it as well as my employees.
Gemini's development team continues to improve the product and provides a comprehensive roadmap of upcoming features that makes you want to upgrade as soon as a new version comes out.
This is a pretty straightforward system. You put in the bug details, a ticket is created, the team is notified. The user interface reflects this very simple and straightforward flow. It's certainly much easier than trying to track bugs with using Excel and email.
Since it is open source, it doesn't have customer service. However, the amount of information on forums is vast. If you can wade through it, you'll get what you need
Implementation was pretty simple. Particularly because the product cannot be customized so there is not much to do apart from getting it up and running.
We migrated away from the whole suite of Rational tools because of their massive complexity around administration and inflexibility regarding workflows. In addition, the suite was insanely expensive, and users hated the usability of the tools. We evaluated, and liked JIRA, but because the organization was looking for cost savings, we ended up going with Bugzilla and it's FOSS model so as to avoid ongoing costs.
It has made the SDLC process more efficient. Bugs were logged and tracked in emails or in Excel sheets leading to slow communication and at time version issues with multiple files. Being an online tool, Bugzilla solved those issues, improved communication, instant status updates and improved efficiency.
We have used Bugzilla with a lot of federal goverment agencies (DHS, CMS, SAMHSA, CDC, HHS etc). Project Directors adn Principle Investigators were at times given access to Bugzilla which provided a snapshot of open vs closed issues.
Some groups would resist using Bugzilla with the email reminders being the main reason. Turning off or reminding them of features where we can 'control' email notification helped a lot.
