Where is it?

One of our clients for work has been on the hunt for an issue tracker to keep track of issues for our web development project and for their internal systems. We looked through a few options and eventually settled on FogBugz. I do not like FogBugz because it's another one of those programs subscribing to that crazy Creating Passionate Users philosophy that says it's great to have people that hate your product. Particularly because I am one of them.

The idea is that they've created the software to have a specific process flow. You either subscribe to their process wholly, or you fit your round process into their square hole. We're in the process of rounding the corners off of our peg just so that the licenses we've paid for aren't a waste. Am I wrong to think that there should be a solution that allows you to apply your standard operating procedure without having to codify it specifically in the software?

What I mean is, if we had a process, we should be able to get the software to conform to it. We shouldn't have to make the software perform every step of the process and enforce it for us. Personally, I would have been happy with a place to list issues and have their histories. Perhaps a way to "tag" and classify them and mark them as open, fixed, or resolved would be enough for me. Maybe I'd want more, but I wouldn't have to fight with some crazy assignment process like within FogBugz, I could just implement a new operating procedure and the software wouldn't need to change.

So I've been looking for an open source solution. We're going to need to recommend some kind of issue management system to other clients, and we may want to switch out this client eventually for something that works better (although by the time we get there, we'll have "figured out" FogBugz and our project will be complete).

What really bothers me about the issue tracking arena is that there are really no good open-source contenders that I can find.

The best of the pack, I think, is Bug Genie. Bug Genie has a nice and friendly interface, and has a ton of features. Maybe an overkill of features. The process is nice, but in this Web 2.0 era, not having Ajax processing (and FogBugz fails here, too) leaves you wanting. Bug Genie also seems more focused on desktop application development, with specific pages to detail your system capabilities. I would really prefer something more web project-oriented.

The disturbing part is that there seem to be a bunch of packages out there to do the job, but they're all commercial, hosted products. Take 16bugs for example. I didn't sign up for their trial, because I'm not interested at all in a paid/hosted solution, but the software looks like the simple kind of thing that we'd want. It tracks issues. I keeps a history. It lets you mark things as completed. What other features are really neccesary? But it's commercial and hosted, so it's automatically off the list. Oh, well.

Basecamp seems like a good fit, if looking for a commercial product. Looking for project management software is something that I had been doing a lot of in the past. Actually, on that front, Basecamp can be almost entirely replaced by ActiveCollab.

ActiveCollab isn't exactly complete, but it provides simple task lists and project management that might get you through. As it develops, I'm sure it'll provide more of the features of Basecamp. Still, these project management packages aren't issue trackers. They don't function well as issue trackers. So they don't work, either.

Mantis may be effective, but I've got to have non-coders using this thing. The interface has to be dirt simple.

What would be truly awesome is a cradle-to-grave project management system. It would let you specify requirements (I would love a subset of the function of Borland Caliber in a web product.), track project development milestones and revisions (integrating into subversion), track issues from clients and QA, automate deployment, and manage maintenance requests. The system should integrate fully with email (allowing/forcing all email traffic for a project to funnel through the system and be tracked), and provide RSS feeds for updates so that email doesn't get clogged with automated notices. (Damn you, FogBugz!) It would also be nice if there was a desktop component, one of the features I do like about FogBugz, that allows you to take screenshots and submit them directly as new cases. The tool should also be able to consume the tracker's RSS feeds and give you notices. Rather than function as a standard feed reader, it could consume Atom (for example) with extra data specific to issue tracking, and let you filter it a bit on the client side, or respond directly to the system. Yeah, that would be nice.

For now, though, I would settle for a really simple system like 16bugs that was not hosted or encrypted (like Olate's Arctic, which isn't bad but still not quite the solution).

Know of anything good?