The Development team have decided to move the bug trackers for phpBB to Atlassian JIRA, we undertook this change after evaluating the options we had available and settled on JIRA as the best solution. phpBB has been using custom written bug tracker software for as long as I can remember, our custom software is simple and it works but it has deficiencies. Instead of updating and maintaining our own bug tracker we’ve decided to use an existing solution, after all we’d rather spend time developing phpBB than developing the tools to manage phpBB development!
Using JIRA we’ve got a number of things we wanted for the existing tracker right out of the box, for example now you can submit not only bugs but also improvements and feature requests. Now before everybody rushes off to the tracker to submit a feature request for kitchen sinks we have a few requests of our own, unless you have a decent proposal already (something more than one sentence) ask on Area51 and discuss it with community members and flesh out a proposal which fully explains what you’d like to add and why. If you have a patch or a Git branch we can pull from for either bugs, features or improvements even better! We’ll be revising much of the development section of the website to reflect the move to Git and JIRA as time permits.
The big deficiency with our tracker was a new tracker instance was required for each software branch, but bugs in branches with common ancestors may very well be shared. Now JIRA allows us to track the status of bugs in multiple branches of phpBB. Also included with JIRA is the ability vote on tickets encouraging us to fix them faster or implement a feature request sooner, it allows us to roughly gauge popularity of a ticket and but greater number of votes will not necessarily mean something is implemented sooner. We gain the ability to track dependencies between tickets, so we know which tickets need to be resolved before others can be tackled.
In the future we will also be using other development tools by Atlassian, but there is no time frame for when they’ll be installed.
You can find the new tracker at http://tracker.phpbb.com/, the security tracker has not moved it still resides at: http://www.phpbb.com/security/.
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