Post: SC Track

content/post/2016-09-sc-track.md

@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+---
+title: "Software Carpentry: SC Track; hunt those bugs!"
+description: |
+  For the SC Track competition
+  entrants were asked to design a better bug-tracker.
+slug: sc-track
+date: 2016-09-12T08:50:15+01:00
+draft: false
+type: post
+topics:
+- Technology
+tags:
+- Software Carpentry
+- Web archaeology
+- Bug trackers
+- GitHub
+series: swc-archaeology
+---
+
+> This competition will be an opportunity for the next wave of developers to show their skills to the world --- and to companies like ours.
+> --- *Dick Hardt, ActiveState (quote taken from [SC Track page][SC Track])*
+
+[SC Track]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071014042747/http://software-carpentry.com/sc_track/index.html
+
+All code contains bugs,
+and all projects have features that users would like
+but which aren't yet implemented.
+Open source projects tend to get more of these
+as their user communities grow and start requesting improvements to the product.
+As your open source project grows,
+it becomes harder and harder to keep track of and prioritise
+all of these potential chunks of work.
+What do you do?
+
+The answer, as ever,
+is to make a to-do list.
+Different projects have used different solutions,
+including mailing lists, forums and wikis,
+but fairly quickly a whole separate class of software evolved:
+the [bug tracker][],
+which includes such well-known examples as
+[Bugzilla](https://www.bugzilla.org/),
+[Redmine](http://www.redmine.org/)
+and the mighty [JIRA](https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira).
+
+[bug tracker]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_tracking_system
+
+Bug trackers are built entirely around such requests for improvement,
+and typically track them through workflow stages
+(planning, in progress, fixed, etc.)
+with scope for the community to discuss and add various bits of metadata.
+In this way,
+it becomes easier both to prioritise problems against each other
+and to use the hive mind to find solutions.
+
+Unfortunately most bug trackers are big, complicated beasts,
+more suited to large projects with dozens of developers and hundreds or thousands of users.
+Clearly a project of this size
+is more difficult to manage and requires a certain feature set,
+but the result is that the average bug tracker
+is non-trivial to set up for a small single-developer project.
+
+The [SC Track][] category asked entrants to propose a better bug tracking system.
+In particular,
+the judges were looking for something
+easy to set up and configure
+without compromising on functionality.
+
+The winning entry was a [bug-tracker called Roundup][Roundup],
+proposed by Ka-Ping Yee.
+Here we have another tool which is still in active use and development today.
+Given that there is now a huge range of options available in this area,
+including the mighty [github][],
+this is no small achievement.
+
+[Roundup]: http://roundup.sourceforge.net/index.html
+[github]: https://github.com/
+
+These days, of course,
+github has become something of a *de facto* standard
+for open source project management.
+Although ostensibly a version control hosting platform,
+each github repository also comes with
+a built-in issue tracker,
+which is also well-integrated with the "pull request" workflow system
+that allows contributors to submit bug fixes and features themselves.
+
+Github's competitors,
+such as GitLab and Bitbucket,
+also include similar features.
+Not everyone wants to work in this way though,
+so it's good to see that there is still a healthy ecosystem
+of open source bug trackers,
+and that Software Carpentry is still having an impact.