For any organization that follows a SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), Bugzilla is a great tool that will facilitate documenting and tracking software issues. Email reminders notify users in the workflow process of who needs to work take action or what the status of the bug is. Task leaders/managers can keep a tab on the overall status of the software bugs. It may not have the bells and whistles of other tools, but serves the purpose as is, out of the box.
[Sentry] is honestly an amazing product. It allows us to detect errors in real time complete with stack traces and any extra accompanying information the developer wants to provide in the alert. With the alerting into Slack it has allowed us to quickly triage and tag in people who need eyes on a specific issue. It would be really useful in any Saas product environment.
Project synchronization. Used as the primary resource for bug tracking, bugzilla can serve as a powerful project synchronization tool. Every aspect of the tickets can be tracked; status changes, comments, added watchers, who's currently working on the issue, and if it's related to another issue.
Unlimited Space. I currently work with a company who services hundreds of clients - and bugzilla helped us manage each one.
For companies with a need to service many different projects, or iterations of the same project, bugzilla handles this task exceptionally well.
Workflow assignments. Workflow is customizable by the simply selection of a checkbox. If ever the workflow needs to be altered, doing so is as simple as a .2 second "click".
User interface is terrible. It was built in the 90s and still looks like it. While the back-end is robust, the front-end is antiquated. It provides too many options and is easy to break.
Reporting is weak. It provides some basic statistics but doesn't provide details. You can find out how many reopens there are, but you can't know how quickly things go from reopen to complete.
Doesn't have the best "canned" workflows. Software is done by teams. Bugzilla doesn't "out of the box" have workflows that mimic what a typical software organization does.
For future projects I will look at something that is hosted in the cloud that I don't have to manage. I would also like something that has a more modern feel to allow my customers to use it as well as my employees.
This is a pretty straightforward system. You put in the bug details, a ticket is created, the team is notified. The user interface reflects this very simple and straightforward flow. It's certainly much easier than trying to track bugs with using Excel and email.
Since it is open source, it doesn't have customer service. However, the amount of information on forums is vast. If you can wade through it, you'll get what you need
Implementation was pretty simple. Particularly because the product cannot be customized so there is not much to do apart from getting it up and running.
Bugzilla is affordable and easier to use by newly forming team or group in our organization. As the team grows bigger we still continued to use Bugzilla as it is comfortable to use. We tried JIRA tool for bugtracking but it was expensive when compared to Bugzilla so switched back.
We actually ended up using both because New Relic is a more robust overall IT infrastructure monitoring product. However, sentry is more developer oriented on the backend and more client friendly on the front end as far as showing results and the dashboard etc. It can provide product level insights that New Relic does not.
Error tracking is a must in any modern dynamic website or app. By looking into the error notifications I'm able to fix errors before anyone even has a chance to complain about them!
Surprisingly, many website issues aren't showing up in Sentry, because they don't trigger exceptions. I'm interested in seeing if I can use Sentry to catch manually-triggered exceptions for "undesirable states" that my website can find itself in. Of course, that means I have to figure out how to have my client code recognize that it's in an undesirable state...
