Startup Tools: Bug Tracking

Over the years working on Sifter, there's one thing we've heard from customers time and again...

Sifter is the first issue tracker our team actually uses.

When new teams start using Sifter, that's what they're excited about. Adoption and participation. They love how quickly and easily their entire team embraces it.

Building high quality software is hard. Testing and fixing is tedious. Nobody enjoys it, and everybody would rather be doing anything else. Overly complex tools force your team to do work they already don't enjoy in a tool they can't stand, and their work suffers as a result.

• Time and money are wasted on training.
• Your team dreads using your issue tracker.
• Fewer issues are logged.
• More issues are lost or forgotten.
• More bugs slip through to production.
• Your customers end up frustrated.
• And your support costs are higher.

These are the hidden costs of complexity.

Advanced tools and configuration sound great in theory. (And they might be great for you too...if you're NASA.) But that power and complexity come at a price. People are confused and overwhelmed. All of the features in the world don't matter if people can't-or won't-use it.

But issue tracking doesn't have to be overwhelming. In most cases, we force the complexity on ourselves unnecessarily.

Sifter is so straightforward that practically anyone - not just developers used to issue tracking systems - can use it. And that has the potential of making every person on the team a valuable contributor to the system.

Simpler Bug and Issue Tracking Works

What if your team embraced issue tracking instead of dreading it? What if you could either avoid the most common questions on projects or make the answers trivially easy to find?

Where should I report this? Did you fix that? Didn't you get my email? Who's working on that? How much work is left? What did we decide? Why did we decide that? Who decided that? What's next?

What if your team always had the answers?

You could...

• Save time and money on training.
• Streamline testing and fixing.
• Catch more bugs.
• Reduce miscommunication.
• Increase accountability.
• Fix bugs right the first time.
• Have a better picture of work remaining.
• Get non-technical team members involved.
• And make your team happier.

These all contribute to better software. Then your team can spend less time fighting fires and more time improving your software. And better software means happier customers. (And conveniently enough, a happier team too.)

I love software that I don't have to spend hours tutoring people how to use. Which is why I love @sifterapp-my non-techies just "get it."Martha Rotter

Sifter's Take on Bug and Issue Tracking

Sifter is simple because after years of trying to use advanced tools, we discovered that simplicity and the resulting participation were more valuable than any set of features.

We set out to focus on the human problems of bug and issue tracking so that people could enjoy the process of improving their software. Finding and fixing issues doesn't have to be misery-inducing work. Sifter helps makes it easier.

• Works great with email. Creating and updating issues in Sifter is just as easy with email. Add attachments. Set an assignee or priority. In most cases, team members can get by barely logging into Sifter at all.
• One home for everything. Every question, issue, bug, idea, or feature request can live together in a single system. Bugs and new development are on equal footing, and nobody ever has to wonder which system to use for a given problem.
• Increased participation. Sifter keeps options and configuration to a minimum so non-technical team members are comfortable using them.
• Quick and easy issue creating and updating. Streamlined forms make it easy for people to quickly add issues. More issues are reported, and less time is wasted filling out irrelevant details for every issue. Sifter even accepts issues from team members via email.
• Straightforward workflow. Sifter skips redundant or ambiguous statuses so your team doesn't need extensive training or documentation to make the right choices.
• Simple status reports. Sifter forgoes extensive custom reporting for simple views into overall project and milestone statuses.
• Crystal clear accountabilty. Issues in Sifter can only have one assignee. There's no passing the buck, assuming someone else is handling it, or any of that. And it's always easy to know who did what and when.
• No participation tax. Having more people involved helps uncover more issues. But paying extra for someone to help test for a single week doesn't make sense. With Sifter, you never have to pay extra or upgrade for the one or two team members that will only involved in the project for a couple of weeks. With Sifter, every account has unlimited users.

The design, execution, and support for @sifterapp is way ahead of what anyone else is doing. Without it, many lives would be worse off.Sean Cullen

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