Making your life easy
I have been using Trac for many years now. Despite it’s severe shortcomings it’s still one of the best issue tracking systems because of its simplicity. The integrated wiki is pretty good and with some basic customisation and a system you can get quite a lot out of it. I get asked a lot about Trac and how it can make life easier. I’ve thought about it a little and I have this to say:
Software doesn’t make your life easier. You make your life easier by understanding what the software can do for you.
I think that there is this misconception that a piece of software should just do everything for you. With any ticket tracking software the software is only as useful as you make it. If you don’t have a good system and by that I mean a manual process which you could follow on paper then software won’t help you much there. You also need to make sure that your expectations are in line with what the software can actually do.
The other problem, which I have to wrestle with constantly, is that any ticket tracking system is only as good as the tickets which go into it. Programmers are lazy and undisciplined by nature, they never put tickets in and they never pick tickets out. When they do pick a ticket, it’s what they want to work on and not what needs to be done. That’s where you need a system in place. This all goes deep into project management territory. In turn, project management is futile if you have no decision making power and that comes from a well structured business hierarchy with clearly written HR guidelines (ie code of conduct, division of responsibility, reporting structure, etc).
At the end of the day, computers are just useless piles of junk without the right people to use them and people are confused unless you tell them exactly what you’d like them to do.
My advice: sort out your people issues and you won’t have to worry too much about your issue tracking software.