When we started developing software systems at Sanmark Solutions, we always felt the need to have a proper issue tracking system. So I read about, downloaded, installed and tested many of the well reputed issue tracking systems such as BugZilla, MantisBT and few others. But finally WebIssues was the solution!

BugZilla didn’t want to run with our favorite Apache+MySQL+PHP setup, and I was too lazy to setup Perl which BugZilla needed. No, I did try to install Perl, but it never did really work.

Then I tried MantisBT, which installed okay. But when I tested it, it was not really okay. May be it’s me. But I found it confusing to use with.

After many more trials-and-errors, I found WebIssues.

First of all, WebIssues is free of charge, which allows us to tick the first of the list of requirements. And it is open-source, of course. Unlike the ones I tested before, although WebIssues is installed on a typical Apache+MySQL+PHP web server, and has a web UI, it also offers desktop applications for Linux, Windows and MacOS.

The availability of desktop interface made WebIssues particularly easier to work with. We don’t need to be hooked-up every time we did our work, we always had the list of issues and their comments and more cached in our own PCs. This specially matched the decentralization we had acquired through the use of Git. Of course, WebIssues made a great partnership with Git. We were quick to name our branches “179”,”753″ or “643” which were Issue IDs assigned by WebIssues. We no longer had to use descriptive branch names when we were fixing a bug or developing a feature that was requested. We just had to type the branch number into WebIssues and we could find all the information we wanted to know about that Git branch, from WebIssues.

I also admired the ability to create different issue types and edit the existing ones. That allowed us to fine-tune WebIssues to our particular needs.

WebIssues also posses the ability to print details related to issues. So, if you’re still in a paper-based office, you can easily get a print out of the issue you just fixed and happily enter it into a physical folder along with all it’s descriptions, discussions, and comments.

WebIssues on SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/webissues/