In 2001 I started my first and perhaps most successful Open Source project I've ever made: IssueTrackerProduct. After nearly a decade of maintaining it I have now officially abandoned it.

It all started when I needed a way to track feedback on my personal website. That's why it was originally called "SiteTrackerProduct". I needed something where I could collect bug reports and any other pieces of feedback and then process it in some structured fashion. It was therefore very important that it would be possible to run the application open for anonymous access. People should be able to submit bugs and issues without having to create an account. You see, kids, back in that day it was actually very common that sites would force users to register and create accounts even just because the content owner wanted it. These days, it's common knowledge that to get people to open up and share anything for others to benefit you make it absolutely trivial to jump straight in without having to see a registration page that looks like a tax return form.

Now, since I long ago abandoned the Zope2 application server technology stack and I no longer use IssueTrackerProduct for anything real it's no longer feasible to maintain this project. In the last five years or so we were actually using it actively to track all projects at Fry-IT where I used to work. I have to say, even though we did grow out of it, it was actually successful. It handled the load (after some much needed patches towards optimization) and it was easy for people to actually use since unlike many other bug trackers, it focused on the non-technical end user first and foremost. As much as possible was done to make it trivial to type in your bug or issue and it automatically took care of all notifications and access rights.

Being a personal Open Source project, over the years, it became a melting pot for experimenting and perfecting various new ideas. Many of them we take for granted today but back then it was quite novel if I may say so. This includes:

  • ability to auto-save unfinished form inputs (added before Gmail had it)
  • automatic updates of the content without reload made it possible to see other people participating as you're typing
  • ability to reply directly to email notifications without having to open a web browser
  • an advanced via-the-web programmable interface for adding and modifying custom fields (e.g. "Customer reference code")
  • full-text search combined with ability to search on specific fields by key
  • file attachments that are images automatically appear as little thumbnails
  • file attachments that have text become searchable (e.g Word documents)
  • advanced filtering where you can easily decide to search inclusive or exclusive on certain fields
  • persistent filtering automatically saved and share'able between different users
  • programmable search filters that are coded in Python which made it possible to create very specific reports
  • ability to export and import bugs from and to Excel for offline processing

Writing all of this, I can not resist to get a bit nostalgic. I did sink A LOT of time into this project. Today when I look back at the code and almost feel sick seeing all the mistakes that I made. Much of the ugliness of the code can be attributed partially to the fact that I often used and abused the code to add new features. Also, because we often needed some features (since it was used to manage all of our projects) "yesterday" and then it was hard to justify doing things "properly". For example, the main .py file is over 14,000 lines of code!

I did called it "perhaps most successful Open Source project I've ever made" in the first sentence. The reason for that is that over the years many many people have downloaded it and installed and let it be used by thousands of users. That's something to be proud of.

Anyway! It's time to move on. So long and thank you for all the fish!

The code is still available at github.com/peterbe/IssueTrackerProduct

Comments

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Ian

Sorry to hear about this. We've actually linked to it forever from http://www.opensourcehelpdesklist.com

Hopefully somebody else picks it up over on GitHub. I've moved our link to there in hopes someone will.

Mike - Dynamic IT Ltd

Thank you Peter. We used this as hour Helpdesk software when starting out a couple of years ago. It was highly effective and I was blown away that something that good was open source (for a new company with zero startup capital). Best wished for your future endeavours.

Peter Bengtsson

Thank you Mike! A couple of years ago I'm confident it was one of the most competitive Open Source Helpdesk apps.

With time I noticed that the line between Helpdesk and Software bug trackers started to get less blurred. Helpdesk is very different from software bugs and when I started I was hoping IssueTrackerProduct could encompass both. It did a decent job but as time went by the requirements got more distinct for each use case.

Federico

The best issue tracker I've ever used, thanks!

Peter Bengtsson

uh. Thank you. I'm glad it worked for you.

Brent Skinner

I used this tool to track requirements, something it wasn't meant to do. The flexibility of the tool made it possible. The support on this product was GREAT! Thanks for all of your help, Peter. I'm disappointed that you are giving it up as I was a big fan. I wish you lots of luck in your future endeavors.

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