About Wastebug

Wastebug is a minimalistic, yet usable bug manager. It’s main design principles are simplicity and usability. It will probably always lack many of the features that managers, control freaks, and methodologists want; it’s designed for developers instead.

History

Wastebug was originally written by Pihlaja Voipio in 2004. After searching around and trying out different options at the time, none of them fitted her needs. Just after the initial release, Laura Boutilier became involved in the development after being introduced to WasteBug by Robert Verheus, a former colleague. Both Robert and Laura had worked with various project management solutions before. Both propriety like Microsoft Team Manager, Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel and open source like SourceForge’s project management and BugZilla. Like Pihlajas findings, no previously mentioned tool suited the job. Using a spreadsheet or plain text document almost immediately forms a nightmare updating the document. The other tools are too big, too complex and stem from their need of micromanaging your team instead of collaboration.

In 2005 Laura forked Wastebug under the name Wastetime for both personal interest and to replace the SourceForge project manager at ASK-Solutions. Wastetime focused more on time spent from the point of discovering a bug or receiving a feature request, starting work and finishing. Through statistical analysis of the entries in the log table, data and graphs were presented. Showing average response time and predictions were made on when a bug or feature request could be implemented. This based on set priorities and team size.

Unfortunate both Pihlaja and Laura lost code due to various reasons and circumstances. Varying from bad employers, decisions at SourceForge and the Tampere University of Technology, the great server crash of 2013, slander, receiving death threats and human rights violations. In the beginning of February 2022, after again struggling some time with various propriety and open source solutions, Laura decided to try to pull together what had survived of the source code of Wastebug and Wastetime and revive the project. We managed to get in contact with Pihlaja, found two complete early releases of Wastebug and some source code remains.

Support

As of now, there is no mailing list or discussion forumns.

If you need, you can get commercial support from ASK-Solutions who maintains this project.

License

Wastebug is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Wastebug is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Contributing

You can send bug-reports and feature request through the project’s GitHub Issues page.

Also see our Contributing Guidelines.