Was there ever in the history of the world a worse bug tracking system than ClearDDTS? The user interface is so ugly, inconsistent and unfriendly that the only way they could have made it worse is if they’d used Lotus Notes as the front end. Slow? It takes a good 30 seconds to enter a new bug or process a change in an existing bug, something that should take way, way less than a second in any competent relational database.
And to top it off, recently it’s taken to kicking everybody off for 5-10 minutes at a time and not letting you log back in, while the sysadmin says “there isn’t anything unusual in the log files”.
The only reason for not throwing the whole thing away and switching to Bugzilla or something like that is that it integrates so well with ClearCase. And it has become apparent to me over the last few weeks that the only reason I loved ClearCase is that we had a really good full time ClearCase administrator, Steve. Since the powers that be fired him, we’ve got two guys struggling for a week at a time to do stuff that Steve could have done in a few minutes. And I no longer love ClearCase.
Let’s throw away the whole thing and replace it with that CMS that integrates with Subversion, ok? What’s it called, Trak or something like that?
Update: Just got an email from the sysadmin – evidently a process keeps dying. One called “update_htpasswd.sh”, which evidently updates the .htaccess file based on what is returned by “ypcat passwd”. Ok, I’m not an expert, but aren’t there ways to authenticate directly to NIS rather than building a .htpasswd file at regular intervals? Sheesh, talk about amateur hour!
Update 2: Minutes after posting that, the ClearCase vob crashed as well, and so I left for home.
ClearCase is indeed ‘l33t if you have a competent herder.
ClearDDTS is in fact highly deprecated.
Paul, take a look at Axosoft’s bug tracking system, OnTime 2007 (http://www.axosoft.com). It runs circles around ClearDDTS and BugZilla. I’d love to get your feedback if you check it out.
You’re thinking of Trac. I use and like Mantis, which integrates with Subversion using SCMBug. I’ve never had the opportunity to integrate it with SVN, so I can’t tell you how well it works.
As someone said, ClearDDTS was actually killed off at least 4 years ago, possibly 5. I can’t remember what Rational/IBM replaced it with, though.
ClearCase is really nice, *if* you have someone competent looking after it. We use ClearCase/UCM at work; it saved a lot of time in writing scripts to go with it, and there’s a fair amount of stuff that either couldn’t be done or would be hard to do with anything else.
(But I still keep a bzr copy of the code, for those odd occasions when the VOB is down. Hasn’t happened for months now though.)
Ah, ClearDDTs.
Its really a system that you love to hate, hate to love, but when its working [properly]…. well its a sight to behold. Just like ClearCase, its great when you have a full (or even 1/2 time) time admin.
I know, I’ve been a ClearDDTs admin for almost 9 years now.
Generally it works about as well as I’d expect from an application older than your grandmother.
P.S. if your company is looking for A+ DDTs administrator with the mad $$, email me. 🙂