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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