I’ve been using a product from Atlassian called JIRA for the past couple years to track tasks, bugs, and requests.

I highly highly recommend it – its an amazing product and the team behind it provides great support and rapid response. They’re also highly supportive of charity and open-source organizations – if you ask nicely, they’ll give you an enterprise license to their products for free!

What makes JIRA great?

• Completely web based
• Highly customizable, including allowing for custom fields for each task type
• Configuration notifications via email on changes to tasks. We currently use this to notify the assigned user and the reporter of a task when changes are made to their task.
• Stupid simple to use – it takes about 30 seconds to create a task and about a minute to train an end user on how to use it.
• Everything is permission based, so you can allow people to view status of issues but not allow them to change them for example.
• Java based, runs in Tomcat on just about any kind of machine.
• The database is flexible. We use SQL Server, but it will support MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, etc.
• You can use it for everything throughout the development life cycle. We start using JIRA right at the requirements gathering stage to collect user stories and then translate them into functional tasks during development. Then as we transition to QA, we mark each task as resolved and QA tests and closes them. QA can then add bugs as tasks and re-assign them to the developers.
• From a project management perspective, the tool provides a centralized view of the entire team – its very easy to see all the tasks assigned to a single person, group, component, project, etc. and then re-assign with a few clicks.
• Its simple enough that non-technical users can benefit from it. We’re currently using it to track marketing tasks, HR requests, IT helpdesk tasks, etc. as well as software changes. It’s that flexible.

I’ve been using JIRA on multiple software projects for a few years now and would highly recommend it as a solution for managing tasks, bugs, features, etc. in a complex environment.

Even if you’re a commercial company, the price for JIRA is totally worth it – licenses are $1200-$4,800US depending on the version you need.