Mantis bug tracking tool 1

calendar Nov 12, 2008 · 2 min read  en knowledgebase software  · bugtracking development opensource  ·
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In the previous article we introduced the reader to the bug tracking tools.

In this article we will analyze Mantis, an open source bug tracking tool It is very important to stress you are going to use much more time to set up an open source bug tracking tool. A fraction of this time is for setting it up, but the vast majority of your time will be spent setting it up, customizing it and recovering information on it.

Mantis

Mantis is a bug tracking software written  in PHP and MySQL. It is very fast to set up, and it has nice feature like:

  1. Very good administration interfaces. You can create projects, subprojects, users and so on. For every user you can assign different roles for each project
  2. For every project you can define custom fields, with a very huge set of properties (like "mandatory flag", and so on. You can also copy custom fields from one project to another, in a simple way
  3. It is possible to customize the workflow, at least at some extend.
Like Bugzilla, the search interface is too complex and can be a pain for an end user, but it is a step forward simplicity

Pros:

  • Easy to set up, very fast.
  • Design of email alerting is good
  • The project configuration is a snap.
Cons:
  • Very ugly interface.
  • Documentation is not organically organized, and finding something is not easy. Even installation instructions are under the stardard