After some recent success, our three-person team recognized that we had to take issue management more seriously. The occasion of our changing hosting from Rackpace to Engine Yard presented us with the task of relocating our svn repository as well as our Trac system that rides on top of it. As it became apparent that establishing a new Trac system would not be trivial. We queried the Rails Gurus at Engine Yard and were pointed towards Lighthouse, by ActiveReload. After some consideration, we began using Lighthouse for our issue tracking and we are happy that we've done so.
Why did we pay to use Lighthouse, when we could have continued using Trac for free? Although a Lighthouse license is very affordable, it is, nevertheless, not free. What features does Lighthouse have that Trac lacks? The most interesting feature Lighthouse has that Trac doesn't is the ability to not only send email, but also receive it. This allows us to update tickets from our email clients. The ability to do this,is, it seems, something new under the sun. Lighthouse also provides SCM integration and API we could integrated with, but we've not explored these featured yet. And while Trac may have these features somewhere, we never got deep enough to use any of them. Lighthouse has moved issue tracking from an annoyance to a pleasure.
The strongest feature of Lighthouse is its interface. Compared to other issue management tools we've used (Elementool, Rally), Lighthouse might seem spartan. And it is!. And that's great! It has a very simple, tidy interface and has kept the number of conceptual units that a user is required to digest to the bare minimum. These units are 'projects', 'people' , 'tickets', 'messages', 'milestones', 'pages', and 'tags'. Lighthouse doesn't enforce a particular methodology, but rather, the decisions about how to use these elements are left to the users -- us. This fact has allowed use to cobble together a process that works nicely for us now, and can be easily changed if we need it to. At first we thought its lack of "Features" might be a problem and even went so far as to question the whole mentality of some of these new lightweight web apps, but in all honesty simplicity as led us to actually use the thing.
Our first impressions are that Lighthouse is both useful and adaptable to the way we actually work. We are very excited to continue our development with Lighthouse there to help guide the way.
