Great post Alessandro, I really like the mindset of the article and fully agree with your conclusion. As it is a relatively older piece, did you try some of the newer issue tracking tools in the meantime?

It'd be great if you could take a look at our freshly launched solution, DebugMe: https://debugme.eu/.

Great points you made. Nice article. Whenever it comes to track a bug/issues, we often get confused which bug tracking tool is better and that's quite obvious. I made some research and made a list of major bug tracking tools that are going to be used in this year 2014 by many organizations. Here's a link to my article, hope this can be a good further read for the readers.
Article link: http://blog.templatemonster...

I am intrigued that you start discussing Project Issues and then morph into software bug tracking. I have never worked on a project that Issues and Bugs were considered the same thing. Do you consider the two to be the same? (A third 'type' being Risks)

Hi David,
I would consider issues and bugs the same thing (or very, very similar), but I have often found myself in contexts where the same tool was used to track bugs, feature and tasks.
That would often lead to confusion as the features you need to track bugs are different from the ones you need to deal with feature development, but it's hard to imagine a team manage the two type of items in two different tools.
What is your experience with this?

You made some good points, and finding the right tool for issue tracking can often be difficult! We've tried JIRA, SmartBear and are currently running Countersoft Gemini. It is really tough finding a right fit for your team!

Realy great article, That will not only help to an organization to enhance their application feature but as well help to all team's those are using tracking system for their issues.

Take a look at AssiTrack. It's very different from normal issue trackers, but in a good way. And it looks like the type of smart issue tracker you wanted.

Interesting take.
I like the distinction of Severity versus Priority:

I guess it could be summarized this way:
* Severity: has functional impact - affects scope.
* Priority: has business impact - affects schedule.

Mike, thank you for the recommendation, it definitely looks like you are doing a great work, especially on the Smart Search and Remote Error Reporting features.

I would suggest you to feature those features more prominently on your homepage: they can be a major advantage point over many of your competitors and I suspect they can make a significant difference in sign ups.

Keep up the good work!

Alessandro, thank you for specifying some possible situations/problems that can occur when using issue trackers. Our team used to apply Microsoft Project, but we found out that for us it is rather time-consuming and tricky programme. Thus, our decision was obvious – looking for a new project management application as our priorities are effectiveness and efficiency. At the moment we are thinking seriously about using Comindware Tracker since our partners are satisfied with it.

i'd recommend you try our product - Snowy Evening. I've long had the same complaints you have (and plenty more) with bug trackers but we're striving to avoid a lot of them with Snowy. Give it whirl and let us know what you think. https://snowy-evening.com

Not an easy question, and a complete answer could be easily worth a post by itself.

It certainly is not BugZilla, at least for the kind of projects I have been working on. It was too cumbersome and it was definitely overkill for small/medium-sized teams, while I guess most of the features it provides are essential for large-scale projects.

I started using Trac a few years ago with a different team and we were quite happy with it, although it wasn't really that easy to manage. For many aspects it shared Redmine's pros and cons: it was great for the integration with wiki (so it applies only if you use it to keep documentation there) and source code; it was poor for task tracking (I share Amy's point of view on this: tasks belong elsewhere).

Jira isn't bad and it is probably one of my favorites, in the end. But I kind of hated the issue navigator and I prefer the label-oriented approach used on Google Code.

I would be extremely curious to try commercial tools like FogBugz and YouTrack but I never had the chance, so far.

I believe that most of the problems I mentioned in this post can affect any system, because they depend on the way people use their trackers. As far as I know there is no tool on the market that addresses those issues effectively: if you ever happen to find one, I am sure it will become my favorite.

I understand I did not give you a definitive answer but as it often happens, the answer is "it depends on the context". My personal preferences are very close to GitHub issues, though.

Which are the best issue tracker you've tried so far?

Interesting post - I agree that all of these things contribute towards bug tracking systems having a bad name. Obviously a bit team size dependent but it really feels like these things should be fixed in the team culture rather than by a tool.

Duplicate bugs are particularly interesting - do they indicate that the test team are focused on testing areas which are considered unimportant to the business (assuming the business is prioritising which bugs to fix) or is it something which is being repeatedly broken?

Tasks being reported in the bug tracking system is my pet hate and I always consider it to be a conversation avoidance tactic which means the ticket is closed and a meeting is promptly arranged :)

It's worth remembering that a bug tracking tool needs management just like any other tool, someone should be responsible for duplicate bugs, invalid tickets and training users on how to use it correctly. In my experience these tools are not popular and quickly become dumping grounds if not cared for.

You are right, team culture is the single most important aspect, and it can make all the difference by itself: a competent team would have found a proper way to use even the worst tool.
In the most of the experiences I mentioned in the post, however, team culture was the single most difficult aspect of the problem to change. And in that cases, I always wished the tool we were using to be a bit more helpful in inducing the correct behavior, instead of making too simple to choose the wrong path.
That's what led me to write this post: things would have been a lot easier if we had a strong QA team (or even just a strong QA lead) but in absence of that, a smarter tracker would have saved us some headaches by gently teaching good habits. What do you think?

About duplicates, in most cases of them were due to lack of communication (different people testing related features and spotting the same issue) and a poor priority management (some bugs took weeks to be fixed).

I totally agree with you that a bug tracker is no place to store tasks, and yet hosted tools like Pivotal Tracker or PlanThat were generally not well accepted by the companies I worked for. Have you found any effective solution to that need?

You noted a significant issue when you mentioned conversation avoidance: I believe it is the root cause behind the tracker misuse I mentioned at the beginning.

The last paragraph of your comment is absolutely correct: no tool can substitute skilled individuals. In most occasions I worked with competent QA teams and I have appreciated the big difference they made. Yet, sometimes, we were not so lucky (because of lack of resources, experience or training).

That's when I started dreaming about issue trackers that could help us, instead of increasing chaos. I believe they could do even more if combined with a strong team with a lot of experience.

Thank you for your insights. :)