Serena Software, current owners of the TeamTrack system we use for defect and enhancement request management, has priced itself out of a customer. Serena bought out the original developers, TeamShare, a couple of years ago, figuring that the workflow management system they had could bring a higher price if targeted at larger enterprises. Evidently they’ve been successful, since they’ve raised our maintenance to the point that our bill for this year would have totaled nearly 50% of the original, reasonable purchase price. I’m as sympathetic a customer as Serena will ever find, but we’re just not getting that much value out of the software.
So I find myself looking for greener bug-tracking pastures. We don’t need fancy workflow or even a lot of custom data tracking, and “cheap” and “easy to use” are pretty high on the list. Other things it should do. So far I’ve identified FogBugz and BugZero as candidates…anybody got any other suggestions? Though Bugzilla certainly meets the “cheap” criterion (at least in terms of purchase price), in my experience it doesn’t score so well on the ease of use scale.