Bug tracking software -- SharePoint

It is hard to imagine how can a group of developers work together without a bug tracking system. A bug tracking system is needed precisely because no human can hold all of the bug information inside his head. Therefore some form of records are needed. And what can be more convenient than a web base bug tracking application?

Before we used FogBugz in our company, we use Microsoft SharePoint 2003 to keep track of our bug cases. The only upside of this tool was, it came at no extra charge. Once you buy a copy of SharePoint server and that was the only amount you needed to pay. Beyond that, it is wretched beyond redemption as far as bug tracking is concerned. Here are just a few points against Microsoft SharePoint as a bug tracker system:

1. It's uncustomized. You see, Microsoft SharePoint is very powerful; it's a generic tool that can be molded into doing anything you want it to do-- or, sort of. But before it can be something useful you have to customize it. That's the problem. SharePoint customization is a huge business and there is no way someone with no experience can do it. So you need to engage outside consultants to do the customization and let them charge you heftly.
   
2. Not only that, you will need to tell them what to customize. That's another problem, because we don't know what to expect out of a bug tracking system anyway. If it is hard to build a good product that is matched 100% to the specs, what are the chances of building a good product that has to be matched to a spec that doesn't even know what to accomplish?
3. SharePoint is slow, too slow for bug tracking purpose. I don't know how can it be. But poor response time drives people away from the app.
4. SharePoint is complicated. To get a bug case entered, you have to do don't know how many steps. And what if you need to capture screenshots? You need to do a lot of steps again. But no one can religiously follow all the steps and at the same time testing or developing an app.
   
5. Linking between bug cases is another headache. A lot of times one needs to link between cases so as to provide a complete picture of what's going on. But the linking between cases are just plain difficult in SharePoint.
6. SharePoint does allow online collaboration and document versioning. This should be a plus point, if Microsoft did it properly. Unfortunately the online collaboration thing is just a place to let you download the document, edit it in your computer and upload it. So at the end of the day we still have multiple versions of the same document floating around. Want to know who edit what? No way! All you get is just a list of different versions of the same document. Simultaneous editing? That's for Wikipedia and Google Docs, not SharePoint.
   

Given that it has so many short coming, finally we decided to dump SharePoint out of the window, and tried something else.