ClearDDTS? I have to ask…

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.