Say Hello To Porchlight
Monday, August 14, 2006
It’s with great pleasure that I introduce you to Bug Tracker For Small Software Development Teams”>Porchlight, the first product from Second Gear. In summary, Porchlight is the bug tracker I have always wanted: lightweight, nonintrusive and attractive.
Backstory
As I started to develop software that required something more complex than a simple text document to keep track of software bugs, I scoured the Internet for a solution that works for me. I tried all the major players, but always felt the same feeling towards them: they were too heavy. Too many fields to fill in. Too many features that I didn’t need. Nothing out there seemed lean enough for me.
So, I set out to create my own solution.
Porchlight is the fruit of 4 months of development and is a pretty good first release if I do say so myself.
Feature Set
The Porchlight Dashboard is your gateway to all your software projects. From there, you can see the upcoming milestones in all your software projects and the recent activity in all the projects you are assigned to. Since permissions are assigned on a per user basis, your team members can be entirely focused on only the projects they need access to.
Porchlight is centered around making it easy to keep track of the bugs in your software projects. As a small development firm, Second Gear needs to keep track of just a few bits of information:
- Title
- What type of bug it is
- How important the bug is
- Who to assign the bug to
- What milestone to set it for
- Description of the bug
- Resolution information
On some projects we don’t even need all of that information. For instance, for Check Off, I only keep track of the title, description and resolution. Porchlight is designed to support as many of those fields (or as few) as you need. It’s all customizable on a per-project basis.
Incremental and iterative development via milestones is important to many software developers, and Porchlight makes it easy to work with milestones. Each bug you create can be attached to a specific milestone. Want to see what milestones are coming up? Click on the Milestones tab and see all of your project’s milestones all at once.
And that’s not all. For a full feature set, check out our tour.
Porchlight Tour
http://www.porchlightnow.com/tour/dashboard.html
What’s Next?
The hardest part of any new software product is setting a stopping point for the initial release. I’m already hard at work on features for the next few releases of Porchlight. Top on that priority list is getting the API completed. With the Porchlight API things like Dashboard widgets and GUI frontends will be possible.
Image uploading support and a more advanced filtering system are on the plate. As for anything else? I’ll keep that a secret for a little while longer. :-)
Pricing
Porchlight has a tiered pricing model. There is a fully-featured, free for life 1 project, 1 user account that can help you get introduced to Porchlight. From there, plans start as low as $10 a month. Check out our pricing page for more information.
Thank you
Finally, I want to say thank you to all of the beta testers who have helped to make Porchlight what it is right now. I would never have been able to pull this off without your help and suggestions.
Comments
Frode Danielsen says:
Looks good! :-) But I think it’ll still be just a slight bit too simplified for my small company’s use. At first glance, what I think we’d miss a lot is the opportunity to group projects in categories. And then, svn-integration would be sweet, but I guess that’s not a kind of feature your product is aiming for.
Just a tip: I didn’t find an easy way to get back to the main page from the tour. If I arrived there through a direct link, I wouldn’t even be able to hit «Back», and would have to edit the address manually.
(From a norwegian guy working in a bit of the same business.. Our newest service, although currently only in norwegian: mailmojo.no).
Posted August 14, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Chris Casciano says:
looks promising after a first spin (with a free one user account) but a few items to note that would concern me and might keep me from using it for my projects:
no obvious bug numbers: while they’re not needed inside an interface like this I have always found they make discussions of a project or project status that much easier
A bug could only be assigned to myself, and could not be unassigned. (this may be a single user mode feature, I dunno)
Lack of reporting: while some information can be gotten by digging down past the initial views, but things like bugs fixed since last milestone (for QA reasons and rel notes) come up often and I don’t see how to get that information easily
a general design comment: there are a LOT of non obvious links. sometimes a header or a table cell is a link and sometimes its not, but I rarely saw a difference of appearance — it took some exploring to know that the project name in the dashboard got you into another view of the project
I just don’t know if the pricing tiers you have established would work for me as someone who carries a number of small / low volume / possibly inactive projects at any given time, each with a different set of stake holders I’d have a hard time justifying a $1200 / year cost for a couple hundred bugs.
Lastly, I would suggest looking at the use of microformats(.org) for contact information and events / milestones to make it easier for users to do things like import contact data from the people pages into their address book.
Posted August 14, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Justin Williams says:
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the feedback . It’s all very good and I have added it to my queue of things to ponder. I do like a lto of those ideas.
In reference to the $1200 a month, if you are a small team with so few bugs, do you really need the $100/month plan? That’s why we have multiple tiers. :-)
Posted August 15, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Chris Casciano says:
You’re welcome.
The concern over the tiers you’ve setup is that though my projects are small, the 5 and 10 user cap on the middle tier plans just would not cover the assortment of people who may need to view the data in addition to actually working hands on with each project. While I could count dev+qa on one hand, when you think of PMs, Management, etc. I can easily exceed those allowances when you get into just 2 or 3 projects.
Posted August 15, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Justin Williams says:
I see what you are saying. Theres nothing to say that we won’t tweak the pricing structure in the future or maybe add a non-privileged user class.
Stay tuned.
Posted August 16, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Nathan Hyde says:
Justin,
Howdy. Just wanted to second Chris’ comment about the pricing tiers vs. number of users. We really appreciated the interface but as stated we are unable to justify $1200/yr due the number of “reporters” we would require. (We have a small dev team of 3 but have quite a few clients, many of which would use the bug interface sporadically.)
Posted February 21, 2007 at 6:08 pm