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Dropbugz

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Published on November 02, 2008

We're always amazed by the creative ways people find to use Dropbox, so as coders, this one struck as particularly awesome. Instructions shamelessly stolen from a Dropbox user :).

Being a tiny startup looking for ways to save money, we discovered the best, cheapest bug tracking software out there. It's dropbox (or dropbugz). Simply make a folder called "bugs" in your dropbox and put a "done" directory in it.-Each bug is a .txt file whose name is the description of the bug.

- Dropbox keeps track of who creates / edits files so if someone botches a description you can always figure out who wrote it up and when. (Unix does a decent job of this too.)

- You can assign bugs by putting "#fixer_name" at the top of the file and grepping for "#fixer_name" on the command line.

- When bugs are done you move them to the "done" folder. If you duplicate a title it overwrites, but dropbox has your back w/ revision edits.

- You can preform any sort of command line voodoo to slice and dice your bugs.

- You know when bugs are posted or fixed through the dropbox notifications.

- You never have to leave the command line and go to a web app to enter bugs. The result for us is that we enter more bugs.

- You can casually browse your bugs using the preview feature on mac.

We didn't have the money for FogBugz and we were using BugZilla which is so miserable that we resorted to not using it. There are certainly features dropbugz lacks, but for basic bug tracking for a small team, it is awesome. And any feature you want to add is just a script and a chron job away. I've used a bunch of web-based bug trackers in the corporate and startup world and this is the only one I've ever liked.