Wow, this one touched a nerve. Some guys here at Sun were arguing about which bug trackers and SCM tools were currently da bombiest, and they decided to ask the world. Hasn’t received hardly any publicity yet, and already over 200 responses. Join in, and pass the word; Here is the survey and here are the results.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Jeff Schiller (Jul 09 2008, at 14:36)
I wonder how valid this is. I personally have not used all of these tools, so it will really be a popularity contest, not a fair assessment of worth.
For instance, I've used Bugzilla and Trac but none of the other 5 choices. So obviously I'll choose the best one of the ones I've used.
[link]
From: John D. Mitchell (Jul 09 2008, at 21:27)
Also, the survey doesn't qualify which of the various tools people have used or not.
[link]
From: Ciaran (Jul 09 2008, at 23:17)
I'm so unfashionable.
For version control, I chose Bazaar which turned out out to be way behind the other choices. Looking at the Others there was a scary entry for Visual Studio Team System which I can only assume was a joke, and also a very significant number for CVS (conspicuously absent from the main list) which I reckon backs up Jeff's point above about choosing what you know. Can there really be a reason anyone would willingly use CVS over SVN? Perforce and darcs were also well represented in the Others.
For bug tracking, I was so unfashionable I had to use the "Other" box myself and entered Mantis, and was apparently far from being alone in doing that.
[link]
From: Mahesh (Jul 10 2008, at 00:26)
Why perforce not listed as a choice? Only open source ones considered? I agree with previous commenter's observation. Survey may only decide popularity than merit.
[link]
From: Fabian Ritzmann (Jul 10 2008, at 01:00)
Jeff wrote:
> I personally have not used all of these tools, so it will really be a popularity contest, not a fair assessment of worth.
Yepp, plus what may be the best tool for someone's development environment is not necessarily the best for mine.
[link]
From: David Powell (Jul 10 2008, at 02:11)
Mantis has more votes than Unfuddle so far, even though it is buried in the 'Others' list.
[link]
From: Scott Hudson (Jul 10 2008, at 10:12)
I'd also like to know about agile lifecycle management/development project planning tools?
Do folks prefer XPlanner, MS Project, Rally, VersionOne, Oracle Agile, ThoughtWorks Mingle 2.0, Sapient ResultSpace, Other?
[link]
From: Stephen Turnbull (Jul 10 2008, at 13:52)
It would have been a good idea to design this survey with
1a. Which of the following $TOOLs are you familiar with (administered, used, or have evaluated for installation)? (Choose several.)
1b. Which of these $TOOLs do you *currently* use? (Choose several.)
1c. Which of these $TOOLS would you prefer to use if you had the choice, and somebody else paid all costs of switching, if any? (Choose one.)
The correlations would be *very* interesting. Eg, one could imagine a negative correlation between 1b and 1c (the "grass is greener" effect ;-).
Nevertheless, if all you've got to work with is a popularity contest, it's still useful. You just need to be careful how you use it.
[link]
From: Erich (Jul 11 2008, at 06:39)
@Ciaran - reasons to use CVS over SVN? CVS doesn't corrupt your entire repository if a bit gets flipped somewhere... I lost a whole SVN repo because something got wonky, and I googled and found a few others who had it, too. The developers of SVN said "that can't happen". But it did. That's not cool.
With CVS, you lose at most 1 file if a bit goes wonky. With SVN, you lose everything...
CVS support in Eclipse is really, really good, and it works great for me.
[link]
From: Shane Caraveo (Jul 11 2008, at 14:11)
I found the survey interesting, but out of curiosity around the ideas of some of the comments here, I created a new survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=PyApiOcaMoCVs8me6T02Ow_3d_3d
Unfortunately, I only have the free account which doesn't allow sharing the results. Perhaps someone with a paid account would be into generating a new survey?
[link]