Choosing an issue tracking system is a crucial decision for every organization. The wrong choice may not be so obvious during the first few months, but later on it may lead to additional expenses exceeding the original cost.

Within even one small project it is often necessary to track various types of issues, such as bugs, documentation changes, and support requests. Various issue types may have different sets of states and transition rules. For example, a software tester is supposed to verify bugs, while a proofreader should control the documentation quality. The system should ensure that the software tester does not get the task of proofreading a text by mistake.

Nevertheless, the majority of systems available at the market do not allow the users to specify a separate workflow for each issue type or for each project. Instead, the workflow is defined only once for all issue types and projects. The common solution is to install several instances of a system, where each of them has workflow configured to track a specific issue type or project. The vendor of one well-known issue tracking system quote their user who writes that it takes 60 instances of the issue tracking system to manage 200 users and 20 projects. In that situation you will have to perform 6 requests just to compare the average time of responding to a support request for 2 projects. Even such a simple operation as getting the list of all unresolved bugs requires to perform the search 60 times - and even then you will have to sum up the obtained results manually. This example is not the only one - the developers of another popular issue tracking system use 15 instances of their own system to manage about 30 projects. The administrators in such companies have to spend lots of time on installing, configuring, backing up and upgrading all the instances of the system. The only who wins in such a situation is the issue-tracking-software vendor - especially when per-server licenses are used, and more instances means more money.

In the majority of systems issues and projects constitute different concepts - they are stored in different tables and they are created using different user interfaces. Very often in such systems you cannot find the project by its name or by the customer and it is not possible to exclude the closed projects from the search results, while to create a custom field available in 5 projects means creating 5 separate custom fields. At first, such systems attract users by their simplicity, but later, because of trying to solve a lot of problems in the project management area, those systems acquire a cumbersome interface and an ineffective architecture.

As a result, the overwhelming majority of systems allow you to conduct the effective management of 5-7 projects and the users have to waste their money on purchasing licenses for additional system instances, thus making the situation still worse.

A hierarchical issue tracking system allows you to effectively solve the above-mentioned problems, but the development of a hierarchical issue tracking system architecture is a complex task that is to be resolved at the very beginning of the development process, for it will be practically impossible to realize it later on. TrackStudio has been developed as a hierarchical issue tracking system, which gives the opportunity to configure the system behavior in the most effective way, taking into account the peculiarities of each specific project, customer, or issue type. TrackStudio will allow you to save money and be ahead of your competitors who use old and ineffective systems. Download free 90-day trial of TrackStudio Enterprise today.