Feature / Bug Tracking Software

2004-11-17

Do any game development teams use any bug tracking software or feature tracking software?

I read Joelonsoftware.com and he goes on about how awesome his product, FogBugz is.

It sounds like a good idea but I'm wondering if anyone else has any experience with anything at all. In fact using FogBugz for product management sounds like a good idea as well, you just submit entires as requests rather than bugs and it will track them and keep the people that need to know aware of their responsibilities.

I know there is for example BugZilla which is an open source product. I also know that based on Joel's comments it sucks. Having tried to enter some bugs in Mozilla's bug list before I can say that basically he's right. It's got a terribly poor and massively complicated interface only an open source programmer could have thought up. 😛

If you have not you read up on FogBugz please check it out to give you and idea of why you might want something like this if it's not already clear. Here's also why it's supposedly better.. I don't bring those up as a sales pitch for FogBugz, I bring them up because they point to a way of doing development, tracking features and bugs, and automating the process of who has responsibility for implementing features or fixing issues. That kind of stuff is sometimes handled by a producer in games but more often than not it's all pretty adhoc. It would be nice to have a system that worked and got used.

Also, even if you don't use a bug/feature tracking system do any of you use anything more for scheduling? Joel recommends just using Excel. I'm not sure, I can see spending 2 or 3 weeks just entering in the million small tasks it takes to make a game. Anyone use MS😛roject? I never could figure out MS😛roject. It seemed like a huge waste of time. Do any of you use it and do you acutally find it useful or is it more like you use it because you think others will think you aren't doing your job if you don't? Others recommend "Agile Development/SCRUM" where you only schedule a month at a time. Have any of you tried that?

I'd love to hear your stories and recommendations.

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