Ask the Entrepreneurs: 6 Pieces of Online Software That Your Tech Team Will Benefit From Using

Ask The Entrepreneurs is a regular series where members of the Young Entrepreneur Council are asked a single question that aims to help Lifehack readers level up their own lives, whether in a area of management, communication, business or life in general.

Here’s the question posed in this edition of Ask The Entrepreneurs:

“What online software has your technology team benefited from the most in order to track and fix bugs, errors, and other web based issues?”

1. MantisBT

MantisBT is free software that works on a variety of databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MS SQL, and also works with just about any web browser. It improves project efficiency, is simple to install and administer, and is easy for end-users to work with also.

– Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

2. GitHub

We’re huge fans of GitHub. It is the central repository for all our code and gives everyone an easy place to view and comment on each others code. Its “pull requests” feature has dramatically changed our development process for the better. It lets us easily do code reviews and spot checks on tough code without having to implement a formal review procedure.

– Peter Baumgartner, Lincoln Loop

3. JIRA

Atlassian JIRA hands down, it lets us track all of this, but also has the ability to scale up to thousands of users and run locally if ever we need that. Also, it is used by tens of thousands of enterprise companies which means that many of our target customer base also use the software and we don’t have to give them another web 2.0 technology to sign up to.

– Robert Castaneda, ServiceRocket

4. Pivotal Tracker

With a small team juggling multiple projects, we need a tool that allows us to be fast and adaptable. We love Pivotal Tracker for it’s extremely responsive control and an UI that gives us a quick overview of the project.

– Brandon Wu, Studio Pepwuper

 

5. Consider UserVoice

UserVoice is a phenomenal plug-in widget for websites to collect user feedback in real-time and track the progress of addressing users’ concerns. While UserVoice’s tools don’t enable code-commits, they have tools in the app that enable an Admin to escalate user feedback as a bug and track the progress of these tickets. I highly recommend checking out UserVoice’s tools for easy-to-use bug tracking.

– Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.

6. HipChat

When an issue requires collaborative debugging, nothing is better than HipChat. There, several team members can work through ideas on the problem, post code snippets and share screenshots in a live chat. Best of all, each chat is saved and searchable, so other team members can look back at the full conversation anytime.

– Michael Mayernick, Spinnakr