For those of you who don’t read the new Qt blog website, where Qt Marketing and Product Management talk about “corporatey” stuff (affectionately called the “PHB blog” by our developers), we’ve just announced that our brand, new bugtracker is public: see http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com.
So, I won’t repeat everything that is in the other blog (it is, after all, written by Marketing, so it should be better written than this thrown-together “reblogging”). I’d just like to highlight one important point that Adam made in his blog:
The Qt Bug Tracker isn´t simply a read-only view into the bug tracking system used by Qt developers, it is the bug tracking tracking system used by Qt developers.
The previous solution was an in-house system we had built over the years. It started as a distribution list for the Qt developers back in the day, then got an automatic tool to reply to the emails received and assign numbers, a robot to collect incoming emails and add to the database. Internally, we’ve had a rich-client to access that database and manipulate our own bugs. But communicating with the reporters was always very difficult.
This new tool is different. Everything is on the web. And you get to vote on issues, even watch if they change.
This is another step in our opening up of our development model. Enjoy!
22 Responses to “New blog and new bugtracker”
I am so very, very pleased by this news!! 
The old bug tracker was, honestly, the only thing that has really disappointed (and frustrated) me about Qt… with that out of the way, Qt is darn near perfect
Keep up the great work!
paul.
Thanks a lot! I was waiting for a proper bug tracker for months. The old feedback form never felt very good to use.
Nice, you’re using JIRA!
Seb (who works at Atlassian)
Now if only this could be fixed by Atlassian …
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-19498?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel
Ah, so it’s an Australian conspiracy!
Joking aside, JIRA was first used by our Brisbane office, then quickly became used by the rest. We analysed what the options were and concluded that JIRA was the best available for our needs. The only thing I’m missing is proper Qt C++ code highlighting (by default, not Java!).
I love it. Puts BugZilla to shame.
It looks like Jira is not open source. Is this correct?
I expect you looked at alternatives like Trac and Fossil. Any chance you could tell us what features pointed you towards Jira?
Finally! This pushes Qt openness further!
My first use of the new bugtracker:
http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-2444?focusedCommentId=100507&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#action_100507
That’s correct, JIRA is not open source.
I was not part of the team that looked at the features needed. I remember seeing some reports on what they tested and what they found out, looking at (at least) JIRA, Bugzilla, our own internal tool, etc. I just don’t know where those reports are. Hopefully they’ll post about it.
But I have to say that internal knowledge of the tool is always a big factor. We had been using JIRA for a while internally for some needs and our sysadmins were already familiar with maintaining it. So we had a place to start, unlike what it would have been for other such tools.
OK, not FOSS but free. So Nokia saves 12k. Not much, but they have to save.
Very nice indeed, it is so much faster to use compared to bugzilla. I hope the Qt community uses this well, and doesn’t make it a dump ground for all sorts of wired errors. I cannot resist pointing to this one: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/08/one-bug-report-to-rule-them-all.html
I looked at the list of bugs and noticed there are some bugs that are already fixed or assigned to a wrong component (especially many that just have “Other” component). Do I simply add a comment there? I fear that all those comments would just add noise.
Additionally, some bugs need further information from the reporter. Are comments forwarded to the original reporter? It looks like the reporter field is actually the “troll” that added the bug to the database…
@Christoph A lot of it is import from the old bug database we had internally, so yes, all the imported bugs will be the troll who added them. Anyone who is interested in a bug tho, can click on the “Watching” option and watch the bug. Also, change notifications will go back to whoever is assigned the bug (I’m not so sure on who reported it).
So, at the very least, watching a bug will send email notifications to you of any changes.
@Carina: we need help from the community. The bug reporting tool is only as good as we make it. We need the community to make high-quality reports and help us with the ones we imported from the old tool.
@thiago, @Carina: unfortunately the situation described in the blog entry is true: Just have a look at Atlassians very own bugtracker: Thousands of duplicate, unprocessed and unclear entries, many of them a couple of years old, referring to quite outdated versions of Jira. No matter if or of not a bug is entered here is pointless: they just do not care / do not have the resources to process them. You just accumulate tons of reports for no reason.
I really hope this will not be the case with the Qt Bugtracker.
It’s a bit sad you choose a closed and proprietary tool, there is a lot of open source alternatives like Redmine (for example) : http://www.redmine.org
It’s also a bid sad that people do not trust that our people looked at open source solutions, too and made a good and sensible choice.
Also, by picking Jira we get public bug tracking now, rather than as soon as we have rewritten a solution that isn’t close to our needs (ask the KDE people how much effort they had to put into customizing bugzilla). (Please don’t argument that red mine might be better suited, I am the wrong guy to convince. Then again, I trust the people who made you could argument with. See above.
I used to work for a company that started using JIRA after they got a bit sick of Bugzilla. I’m afraid I really didn’t “get” JIRA. It may have been the hosting company’s fault, but it was always incredibly slow, and I found the UI confusing and unintuitive. After a few months, they got rid of JIRA and started using Lighthouse instead, although that was after I left, so I don’t really know how that compares. That was a year or so ago; maybe it’s improved since then, but I remain unconvinced by JIRA :p
Please, can everyone signing up to the bug tracker ensure that they use a valid email address. Sadly, it will be necessary to delete any accounts with invalid email addresses. - Qt JIRA admin
Finally! Now I think we’re about as open as I once dreamt of! Actually, I’d rather have _everything_ open, no internal wikis, no internal roadmaps. Hell, we could even podcast our teamlead meetings?! ;D
@ummon: I have to agree with daniel here. Trust that we did look around before choosing. And, as we’ve shown time and time again, we have no big issues changing from one system (perforce) to an even better one (git) when we see the benefits - so if in two years time a better system materializes - we can switch again.
This is a great day for Qt!
May I ask why I can’t sign up for this bug tracking system with my OpenID?