Sat 13 Jan 2007
16bugs is a hosted bug tracking solution developed by Michele Finotto. The app has both free and paid versions and uses PayPal for payment. 16bugs has all the AJAX, RSS and javascript effects you would expect from a Web 2.0 app.
Before I did any actual Googling I was under the impression that there were numerous hosted bug tracking sites. The first site that came to mind was Basecamp, the hugely popular project collaboration and management app. But it turns out they don’t actually have a specific bug tracking module. This appears to be intentional, to some degree, so as not to restrict there market to only software development.
In fact after doing some Googling I was surprised how few players there were in the hosted bug tracking arena. And the ones that were out there seemed decidedly weak and dated (aka not Web 2.0 (aka no AJAX)).
Michele felt the same way:
I’m a developer and as any developers I needed to track bugs in my
code, but available solutions weren’t good enough for me, so I decided
to roll my own bug tracker.
16 bugs was started in March of 2006 and took about two months to release the initial version, although new features are being added constantly. The app was built using Ruby on Rails with a MySQL database. Users can upload attachments with their bug reports, which are stored using Amazon’s S3 (Simple, Storage Service).
One of the coolest features is the ability to create dynamic 16bugs subdomains. For example I made a test company for this blog. You can even style your subdomain, although the options were limited to a list of the color scheme and uploading your logo.
This opens up an interesting area - social bug tracking. Many open source projects already do something like this, where users can post bugs. I have yet to see this same style approach taken to web sites. Some sites have forums where users can post issues, but it would be cool if more sites/companies tried this open approach. Obviously some bugs would have to be kept private, such as “admin/admin is a hard coded login that will allow full access to the site”. For now 16bugs only allows open viewing of bugs (configurable of course), not posting, but I think that would be an interesting direction for this app to take.
Michele seems to have found a not so small niche and has positioned 16bugs to fill that need. The app has all the basics you would expect from a bug tracking solution, giving in the framework to grow into something truly unique and special.
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January 13th, 2007 at 10:04 am
A couple comments/bugs I saw while using 16bugs:
1) On the signup page I would make “Terms of Service” and “Privacy Policy” links to the documents in the area where you have to select the checkbox. I realize that there are links right below in the footer, but I think its good practice to include them in the area where the user is actually agreeing to them.
2) Some messages appear when the page loads, then fade away pretty quickly. I would prefer that the message stay. Often times I’ve switched tabs while I wait for a page to load and may not have switched back in time to catch the message.
3) The add new category and version links pop up an old school style javascript box. These kind of stand out, especially since the rest of the site uses a lot of slick UI elements.
4) My uploaded logo has a 5px white box around it. This makes it look more like a template that I’m stuffing my logo in, rather than a themed web app (if that makes sense).
5) I noticed that where you use the famfamfam icons (a great icon set by the way) you append “?unixtimesamp” to the end of each one. I’m just curious why you would do that.
6) This is one I would love to have answered myself. It is common to do * { padding:0; margin:0; } at the top of a style sheet. I used to do it on all my sites, but have stopped because it causes select form fields to be cut off (screenshot). I can not for the life of me figure out how to fix this, other than to remove the css declaration.
January 13th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
> I noticed that where you use the famfamfam icons (a great icon set by the way) you
> append “?unixtimesamp” to the end of each one. I’m just curious why you would do that.
Rails does this automatically so that your browser cache behaves properly. If you go through the html, you’ll see all the graphics and CSS file has a timestamp at the end
January 14th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
In the 16bugs case, he only seems to be using it on the famfamfam icons. This does seem like a neat feature of Rails though…I keep meaning to give it a try.
January 14th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
A small correction: 16bugs uses S3 for backups at the moment, but Michele says he plans on using it for the main storage at some point.
Also since the practice of using #’s in domain names is increasing I asked Michele why he picked 16. His response: “To put it simply, it’s a number I like.” So there you go.
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:56 am
16bugs is great, but i think bugwiki.com will work even better for some people. Completelty stripped down, it is very unobtrusive and easy to learn. UI definately nicer than 16bugs.