How well does Bugzilla work for Scrum project management?

Question

We have MS Sharepoint - it’s not all bad for managing a task list. Data is publicly available, people are notified of changes and appointments.

I think Bugzilla might be a little easier for management and reporting purposes. Although there are some good Open Source Scrum management tools, I have spent a lot of my political capital and cannot ask for too much more than what we have now. Money is not an object - obviously - it is an idea that my team has too many specialized tools.

Will Bugzilla work as a more general project management tool - outside of bug fixes?

Will I be bitterly disappointed and want me to download something else and do my thing for a better project management tool?

Answer 1

Bugzilla is a great bug tracking system. We tried to use it for other project management tasks, and the results were less stellar. I would recommend finding something that has been designed with your goals in mind.

Answer 2

Try it yourself.

Get a $ 15 / month account on wush.net and use it yourself for a while (without a business relationship, except for a satisfied client).

Bugzilla is powerful and has many configuration options that can be confusing.

I personally used it three years ago in a project that I was working on. I did not have a project manager and I was a developer, so I needed a very lightweight overhead system. Bugzilla gave me this. I set myself my main task as improving the "production system", and then made addictions to achieve this goal. As a result, I had 160 nodes, all depending on each other. This, in essence, is a structure of work destruction. I did not bother to estimate the time, and I did not engage in any other project documentation.

The good advantage was that when I encoded, if I noticed that something needs to be done, I just pop it in bugzilla (the 20-second process after creating it), bind it as a dependency and go back to what I did.

Whenever I complete a task, I look at the dependency diagram and find the most distant leaves (errors that others blocked but were not blocked) and work on it.

The advantage of this method for me is that if the task looked simple and had one node associated with it, but when I did it myself, I realized that it was more difficult, I would just split it into different subtasks. It took only a minute and absolutely did not involve a meeting with the project manager.

Other people on the team could track my progress by looking at open errors, closed errors, sorted by date, etc. They saw the action, they left me alone. When I had external dependencies, I would make a mistake, detail the work and send this person a link by e-mail. Then they could understand why this is necessary if you look at the dependency diagram.

Please note that if it was not previously agreed, I did not assign them an error.

It worked very well, and the system was ready a month earlier.

How will this work with SCRUM? I just could not tell you that it was a cursory glance at the fight. But that was my experience.

Using a dedicated host will allow you three things:

• support
• simple update (unless you have a guru in your home, running bugzilla is not easy - at least for me)
• users across organizational boundaries.

Please note that bugzilla has all kinds of security features, so it’s easy to block users with what they need to see.

Answer 3

We have successfully used Trac and Subversion for several projects.

The main advantage here is the ability to customize reports, some very specific to Scrum, to provide information to management.

Answer 4

My standalone solution is DokuWiki + MantisBT + Subversion + Review Board, which can be integrated with relative ease. An alternative to hosting is Bitbucket.org. The rationale is that you write user stories on the Wiki and you can link to their specific tasks. Larger bugs can be jointly developed, and the "wiki" link is provided in the Mantis bug report. The review tip allows peer code checks against svn diff before the change is made.