Every (open source) software project needs a tool for bug reporting. Without such a tool it is hard because you need spreadsheets or mailing lists to manage todos. I think every developer knows why such tools are used

There are a lot of bug reporting tools like Bugzilla, JIRA, trac, Mantis, ... There are also a lot of project management tools with built-in ticket systems like Redmine.
It depends on your needs, if you develop open source or commercial software, the available money, ... which system is best suited.

We evaluated some systems and decided us for Flyspray.

Why?

We need a bug tracker that

• is also a change request management tool
• should be used from our customers (end-users)
• should not have tons of configuration options
• should be commercially useable
• should be open source
• should be easily adaptable
• should allow custom styles/themes
• should be template based
• should not waste development time

Many points have been met from different tools, but the popular tools were too complex or heavy weight. Flyspray is different, because it focuses on the basics. One of the problems are custom styles/themes. It supports custom themes but it does not support custom site templates.
But it offers most features that a professional system should have, it is small and easily adaptable - compared to other tools. And the tool is not only for developers. An end-user can handle it.

We knew that the system needs some tweaks. We added support for

• custom site templates (per project)
• custom mail templates (text, html, ..)
• enter officer for a ticket (group setting related), add effort (per ticket, per comment), add internal comments
• added a switch that disables global priorities/severities,status, ...
• set severity colors via database per project (instead of css)

This are some of our changes. We also fixed some layouting problems and created custom themes/templates.

If you are interested, look at our Flyspray installation:

SIB Visions Theme:
https://oss.sibvisions.com

Different style/site templates:
https://oss.sibvisions.com/index.php (WebUI)

If you are interested, leave a comment.

We have posted that JVx quality reports are available.

Today, we also offer nightly JVx builds. The builds contain (nightly) in the Implementation-Title and Implementation-Version.

Don't use nightly build versions in production environments.

To use our nightly builds, go to

https://dev.sibvisions.com/jvx.nightly/

and click the Download link in the top menu.

Redmine is a very useful open source project management tool. It has great features and just works!

We use it for our internal quality management, as project documentation system and for time tracking. The time tracking feature is good but has some limitations. It is not possible to enter start/end time, only hours are possible.

Why we need start/end time?

The Austrian law defines that an official time recording, needs start and end time.

We found no plugin that offers the missing features, so we changed Redmine (2.0.3) to fulfill our needs. We added From/To input fields in the time tracking form, added a new permission for the time tracking module because only managers should see the time recordings of other users. A Developer or Reporter should not see time recordings of other users. It was not a lot of work, but it helps a lot

Here are some screenshots:

Time spent overview New link		Spent time
New permission

If you find our extensions useful or if you need the same features, leave us a comment.

Congratulations to Stefan Wurm for graduation!

He sent us his Master Thesis about JVx EE. It is a great documentation about the features and power of JVx EE. The document is in German.

Feel free to send us your comments.

The project is hosted on sourceforce and is available under Apache License 2.0.