Integrating SugarCRM with external bug tracking

[mikeyp]

Hi,

I"m doing some requirements research around integrating SugarCRM with external bug tracking systems, and I'd like to get some opinions on the typical functionality that's desired or needed.

a) For bug tracking systems, so far I'm looking at Bugzilla, Jira, and Trac. However, I'd like to get some opinions on which of these is most popular with SugarCRM users so I can prioritize them.

b) For the actual integration, there are a lot of ways to handle this. In practice, I see two general approaches used:
1) A Synchronization approach, where bug reports created in Sugar are replicated to the external system, and vice versa
2) A data integration approach, where reference data like products, versions, accounts, contacts, and so on are kept in sync between the two systems, so bugs and be created without having to re-enter data in the tracking system or maintain the reference data manually.

Is there a strong preference for one approach over the other ?

c) In my experience, the most powerful feature of any bug tracking integration is maintaining a many to many relationship between cases and bugs. Once this is in place, it's possible to determine which bugs are encountered the most (e.g. to prioritize fixes) and by who. Is anyone doing this with SugarCRM, or is there interest interest in this ability ?

Thanks for your comments,

mike

[eggsurplus]

Mike,

We use JIRA and integrate it with Sugar. I highly advise to not synchronize the data so that there are two different sets of the same data. It will save you many man hours if you avoid this in maintaining the final solution. I've tried that model a few times and each came back to haunt me later on. Your c) is exactly what we love about Sugar's Bug side so to leverage the power of JIRA and Sugar we use JIRA for the bug (issue) side and Sugar only for the relationships (with cases, contacts, etc) and the assigned user (user on the support side, not the dev side).

Check out http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showp...2&postcount=10 to check out how we do the integration as well as to download the files we use. We basically extend the Bug bean so that it pulls the data directly from JIRA.