Bugs in a project or software can prove to be a developer’s nightmare. If they’re not correctly handled, they can be forgotten about and cause problems in the long-run. This is why bug management systems were created. However, most of these can completely miss the point and bombard their users with features they really don’t need just for the sake of being able to boast the amount of features offered.
Bugrocket is different.
Focusing only on the tools that you need and eliminating the ones you don’t, it provides a nice environment to manage bugs within a development team. Read on to find out more about Bugrocket.
Overview
Bugrocket takes care of bug management for small teams that need a method of keeping track of bugs for a particular project or product. After getting an account set up, you’ll be presented with an interface for an app that is incredible easy to use. It comes complete with just about everything you could possibly need to make managing bugs within a small team stupidly easy without the hassle of tools that are never going to come of us. It offers its features with the incentive of allowing developers to focus on their usual duties without having to worry so much about how bugs are stored and having to search for each one.
Overview
Pricing
The app provides a simple one-tier plan that follows their aim to be as simple as possible. For a mere $20 per month, users are able to make use of unlimited projects, users and are given 25GB of file storage for ticket attachments. That’s it. No worrying about whether the plan you have is going to be too much or not enough, just one plan. This is a concept that I think many other web apps would benefit from, ensuring that their users get just what they need for a reasonable price.
Welcome to Bugrocket
Registering with Bugrocket is as simple as it gets. It doesn’t ask for much information, simply requesting that a subdomain be chosen, as well as asking to provide an email address and password. After this, registration’s pretty much complete.
Registration
Bugrocket does, however, explain really well the finer details of the app and how it works through the use of a mini tour that is shown once users log into the app for the first time. After this, users can get cracking with taking full advantage of Bugrocket.
Bugrocket Tour
Projects
Everything is organised in Bugrocket which means that should a developer need to find a certain ticket or list fast, it can easily be done. The app also promises to get rid of the useless features that so many similar apps sport and only keep the integral ones that are most likely to be of use. One of the features they deemed useful (and rightly so) is projects. These are used to categorise tickets into a more general form that spans the entirety of a project and can further be broken down into lists (something I’ll come onto next) to ensure that team members notifying of bugs know exactly where to file the tickets, leaving more time for the developer to spend working and less time spent re-categorising tickets.
Creating a Project
Lists
These are the next step down from projects in terms of organisation and comprise a group of tickets that usually pertain to a particular release of a project version. These could be anything from a major upcoming release that’s currently undergoing a private beta to a more general category such as the future where there is no definitive completion date. This is a great feature of the app and really shows off its focus on simplicity while providing something that’s actually useful.
Creating a List
Tickets
Tickets can be added to the Bugrocket list quite easily and once a brief title for the ticket is given, the app provides various other options for additional information to be provided. Among these is the ticket status which can changed to reflect the circumstance surrounding that particular bug’s progress, the assignee with whom the bug’s responsibility resides and a three-level priority system to allow developers to easily identify the most important bugs. Files can also be attached at this stage to better explain the nature of the problem and an additional longer description can be added. The app makes use of the Markdown syntax to allow better presentation of the descriptions and tags are even supported.
Adding a Ticket
Once added, tickets can easily be browsed within the team and dealt with accordingly.
Ticket Overview
Filtering Tickets
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking for a good quality bug management app, you’ve found it. It comes with everything you need to be able to manage such a simple but sometimes frustrating task, and it does its part to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible. It rocks a very clean and easy-to-navigate interface that compliments the app quite well and definitely reflects its goal of being as simple as possible but still as functional as can be.
One feature that Bugrocket did seem to lack, however, is the ability to allow ordinary users to submit bugs instead of just those with full access to the Bugrocket account. This limits its user base because some teams require their bug management app to allow external users to submit bugs. Even so, it could be utilised well in a small or large development team that needs a centralised database to manage them. The pricing method can be either beneficial or a real pain, offering only a one-tier system that will either benefit you greatly should you require a large amount of storage but if you only use a fraction of what is provided, there is the risk of feeling like you are paying for storage that you’re not using.
Overall, minor quibbles aside, it’s definitely worth checking out if you need a rock-solid solution to the pain that can be bug tracking.