Client Server Open Source Defect Tracker

Many of us development and engineering teams leverage defect (bug) tracking systems that provide some organization to our work processes and overall goals of our projects that we have been working on.  In the past I've worked exclusively with AxoSoft's Ontime defect tracking suite which is by far one of the best commercial applications on the market.  I was posed a pretty difficult task here recently with one of my clients, in proving why a defect tracker will help the business grow and become more streamlined.  So I was off to find an open soure defect tracker that would show the true nature of what a good defect tracker implementation will do for the company.  This is where I stumbled across this really nicely put together client-server defect tracker that is very similar in operation as Ontime called -- WebIssues.  WebIssues is a very new and green defect tracker out there so there isn't any source control integration at this moment but really focused on the details of defect management.

Project Homepage - http://webissues.mimec.org
Project Creator -  Michal Mecinski
Primay platform of deployment - Linux (LAMP based)
Project Roadmap - http://wiki.mimec.org/wiki/WebIssues/Roadmap

Deployment of this platform is very straight forward if you are familar with LAMP server deployments.  If you have a basic LAMP server installed you'll have this deployed in 20 minutes max.   I will quick highlight the installation process as well as a couple post installation configurations you may or may not want to implement to get as much out of this platform as you can.

Here is the "Server installation chapter of the manual" with some of my additives.

1.  Download and unpack the webissues-server package. Move all files from the unpacked directory to the web server's document root or your public HTML directory. Refer to the appropriate documentation for more information about configuring the web server.  Refer to Howtoforge tutorial describing the "Perfect Server" setup of your distibution

2.  Create the storage and log subdirectories in the server's location. Make sure they are writable for the web server and not accessible for anyone else.

    mkdir /opt/www/bugtracker/storage
    mkdir /opt/www/bugtracker/log
    chown apache /opt/www/bugtracker/storage
    chown apache /opt/www/bugtracker/log

3.  Create a database and a user with sufficient privileges to create tables. The Database chapter contains instructions for creating the database using the standard command line tools. If you are using a different tool for managing the databases, refer to the relevant documentation for more information.

    mysql -u root -p localhost

    create database webissues;

    quit

4.  Copy config/config-template.inc.php to config/config.inc.php and edit the created file to configure database connection and other settings. See Configuration for more information.  There really isn't anything different here than any other web applications, just fill in the blanks with the relevant information.

5.  Point your browser to the setup.php script in the server's location, for example http://www.example.com/setup.php and follow the installation steps. The script will check the configuration, create the database tables, set up the administrator account and import an initial set of issue types.

After the setup is finished, you will be able to connect to your server using the WebIssues Desktop Client application to configure the projects, folders, issue types and user accounts. Use the location of the index.php script as the server's URL, for example http://www.example.com/index.php.

Settings up E-mail Notifications changes made in the config.inc.php file

$config[ 'notify_enabled' ] = 1;
$config[ 'mail_engine' ] = 'smtp';
$config[ 'mail_from' ] = 'bugtracker@yourdomain.com';
$config[ 'smtp_host' ] = 'smtp.example.com';
$config[ 'smtp_port' ] = 25;

optional: secure mode, can be 'ssl' or 'tls' (if blank, connection is unsecured)
$config[ 'smtp_secure' ] = '';

optional: user name if server requires authentication
$config[ 'smtp_user' ] = 'bugtracker';

optional: password if server requires authentication
$config[ 'smtp_password' ] = 'secret';

Right now there are some lacking functionalities from the software suite that makes it very useful for larger development groups specifically these following points:

Source Control Integration
IDE Integration - Netbeans, eclipse, Visual Studio, etc
Automated Scrum reports
ability to add custom fields.

Once those functionalities are added there is going to be a very valid competing product for Ontime.  I will keep reporting on this project here in the future as I will be leveraging it to prove the concept of bugtracking as a business developing tool.Tags: bugtracker, webissues, opensource

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