Bugzilla may not be Godzilla of bug tracking tools, but comes very close.
Overall Satisfaction with Bugzilla
We have multiple groups/departments within the company. Most groups that do some software development or maintenance use Bugzilla as a bug tracking tool. Being open source, and our company being a non profit, it serves our purpose very well. Some groups have started using JIRA (which was also offered without any cost towards the license).
We have used Bugzilla on multi million contract projects, without any issues. Our federal government clients also have access to some of the projects (issues) to track the status of open/closed bugs.
We have used Bugzilla on multi million contract projects, without any issues. Our federal government clients also have access to some of the projects (issues) to track the status of open/closed bugs.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- Dashboard - If a landing page with a graphical display was available for use by management, that would help a lot.
- Customizing - Need more flexibility with customizing fields (renaming, adding etc).
- Workflow - If we could have templates that could be followed by various projects (which is how organizations work), that would encourage more project teams to adopt usage of Bugzilla.
- Add/Filter Enhancements or Requirements - Often times an enhancement is logged that is not a bug, but this cannot be distinguished easily. Provide option to log not just a bug, but also Enhancements or Requirements.
- 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.
JIRA from Atlassian, Quality Center from HP, TRAC were a few other tools that we had considered. The core features are present in almost all the competing tools. Bugzilla may not have a user interface as good as other tools, but serves the purpose very well as a bug tracking tool.
Bugzilla is missing a dashboard, and does not integrate with as many third party tools as do other competing products.
Bugzilla is missing a dashboard, and does not integrate with as many third party tools as do other competing products.
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