Anyone who follows this weblog knows that I have been searching for a usable, useful, and fast web based Issue Tracking System. While I've used issue trackers for many years, I found myself working in a situation where most Issue Tracker offerings were too large for our shop and just working exclusively out of tools like OmniOutliner was getting in the way of communucation.
I have given Tracker numerous tries. This product, an excellent piece of work by Ken Manheimer, is old and abandoned. And it's slow - although its speed may be a result of some of the Python 2.1.3 issues (even after patching) that exist on FreeBSD 4.5. Speed, and apparent lack of compatibility with Zope 2.6, drove us away from this solution. But speed was a big factor.
Speed got worse when we tried a Plone solution, mixing in Plone content and CMF Collector (a half abandoned also-unfinished sibling of Tracker). I was initially quite excited about this setup. And we're still going to use the Plone bits to house documents, images, etc. But - it's too slow. It's painful to add new collector entries, which leads to issue-tracking-via-whiteboards and papers. Which, as many of us know, doesn't work when more than one person is involved. Too often, you're meeting in another place and think "oh, arg, I don't have the list with me" or "do you have the latest version of the list?" which is especially problematic as lists change and new issues pop up, and some cross out others.
So, we've come back to Roundup, now at version 0.5.5, after initially using it (with some success) last June. The user interface has improved nicely since 0.4, and is a bit easier to manage now that it's using Zope's Page Template system for templating. Security has also shown up, which I hope to use to enable a piece of our grand vision - letting customers see their outstanding issues (and maybe even submit them). And most importantly, it's still fast.
The new experiment we're trying is to have a single Roundup instance and dump all projects into it. We were running into issues with the last two Zope setups because we let each project have its own Tracker/Collector. This was fine at the time, but the number of shared resources across projects (workers, components, etc) is increasing. We had one product in the last system that was spread across three separate collectors - one for the base product, one for the two customers using it. It made sense at the time (primarily due to different principals involved), but now one had three places to keep an eye on for issues.
I don't know if this is the end of my search, but I hope I'm getting close. Thanks go to the Roundup developers for keeping Roundup small, fast, and really quite flexible (and big thanks for the documentation improvements since my last look!).