Bugzilla vs. FogBugz vs. OpenText Silk Central

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!

Incentivized

FogBugz has been a very useful tool to our organization, and much preferred over other options we reviewed, mainly JIRA. There are still some improvements needed, but with the fairly recent acquisition by DevFactory, we have a great deal of hope for what is in store given DevFactory's focus and transparency. It seems like both DevFactory and FogBugz customers are eager for substantial improvements on the front-end, but there is/was a great deal of backend housecleaning that definitely needed to take place first.

Incentivized

We didn't just select Borland Silk Central randomly. In the selection process, we actually evaluated in total 26 available test management tools in the market. We sent surveys to all potential users in the department to collect their wish list of our next management tool, converted them to a criteria list, and used that list to evaluate all 26 tools. We reduced the possible candidate tools to five and organized a small committee to pick the final three. Top management then checked their price tags and selected Borland Silk Central. Based on this evaluation process, I would say Borland Silk Central is suitable to an organization which has no more than 60 testers; needs both manual tests and automated tests; needs on-line support; needs a low learning curve and has a limited budget. My personal view is that this tool reaches the balance points among ease-of-use, budget and support.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Tasks, Subtasks, and notes. All three of these areas were critical for our team. Tasks in Fogbugz were a bit easier to see than in more bug based software like Trello or JIRA
• The entire screen is used to view a task or case. Clicking on a task or case will open up and take up the entire screen, aside from the sidebar nav columns. I like to see details and I think Fogbugz does this very well, using up as much digital real estate as possible.
• Flowcharting in Fogbugz with Creately is nice - instead of getting an exterior flowchart software like Lucidchart, Creately works right in Fogbugz.

Incentivized

• Borland Silk Central is good for the users to associate test requirements, test cases, execution plans and test reports together. Each asset (test case, requirement, etc...) provides links for the users to jump to other assets in a click, and the users can jump back and forth between two assets.
• Borland Silk Central is also good in test automation. Although Micro Focus does provide a client tool for test automation, the users don't really need it to automate the tests. In our case, we are using Python to automate the tests and use a batch file to launch tests, and in Borland Silk Central we just call that batch file from server side. The test result is automatically fed back to Silk server.
• Micro Focus also publishes the schema of the database behind Borland Silk Central, so it is very easy to extend its function beyond its original design. Moreover, because its schema is published, we can easily retrieve and process its data for business intelligence purpose.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The simplicity of a single admin type user is not great because anyone who can create a job or client in the system, can also add and delete users. Content and User administrative rights should be separated.
• There are ways to change the terminology/lexicon within the tool, but we are not able to get it to work even after reaching out to tech support. So we are forced to use the system terminology that doesn't match up to our company making training a bit difficult.
• There is a subscribe function that you can opt into, there should be a way to add subscribers as you create a new task.

• On the other hand, the plugins of Borland Silk Central with third-party tools are programmed poorly. In our case, the plugins for JIRA have a lot of limitations and were almost unusable in our test environment. (They did improve the plugins a little bit later, however.)
• The tech support people are located in UK, so frequently it is difficult to get a hold of these guys due to different time zones. Also, most of them obviously don't have enough experience and sometimes drove us nuts in emergency situations.
• The last thing I feel is that Micro Focus possibly doesn't provide enough manpower to maintain Borland Silk Central. There are tons of feature requests for Borland Silk Central pending there. Although they have frequent hot fixes every few months, they don't digest these requests quick enough.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

I used it.

Incentivized

I like this rating.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I know it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I like JIRA a lot better than Fogbugz for many reasons. If I had a choice, I'd use JIRA every time

Incentivized

We had evaluated, for example:

• IBM Collaborate Suite - it is way too complicated and the learning curve is too high.
• HP Quality Center - it is OK but a little bit expensive.
• TestLink, Squash TM and other open source tools: The capabilities of open source tools just can't compare to commercial tools. Although we can modify the source code to improve the tool, we are just test engineers, not developers.
• Zephyr: Our testers simply didn't like its UI - too weird.

Incentivized

I used it

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Saves time by quickly allowing Developers to make the necessary notes without getting bogged down in bloated UIs
• Has allowed us to look back easily and see the exact code changes made for the exact Case to aid in decisions for current changes, increasing the certainty of the decided path, without regression

Incentivized

• Borland Silk Central provides a centralized test platform for multiple test departments in the company, so now all of the departments know what each of them is doing. In turn, all departments can coordinate with each other to reduce the duplicated test items and increase the overall test efficiency.
• Also, Borland Silk Central enables the users to publish the test procedure (steps) of each test case so all the users can know how each test case is performed. It is not like what we had before, the test procedures resided in difference place from Excel to Google drive or some other weird locations.
• Also, because all departments are using Borland Silk Central, all testers of the departments have better communication regarding testing methods. In the past, the department used different test management tools and it was hard for the testers to understand each other's testing methods.
• Finally, because all departments share BorlandSilk Central, they also share the same set of reports published to Atlassian Confluence, so now they use the same set of reports to evaluate the test progress.

Incentivized