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I am gearing up to start a project where development will be taking place in-house and with a third party at the same time.

I am trying to find a solution which will allow both us and the third party to view and process any bugs which have been reported, whilst helping me to track their progress in an efficient way.

We won't have time to set up a new server, gain permission from my company to allow outside access, and the set up the database. We have a sharepoint "database" which has been used with some success in-house, but that cannot be pointed to the outside world.

The only solutions I can see is exporting our DB and sending it to the outside developers, or signing up for a bug reporting system which is hosted online. The former of those two is never fun for a test lead on a big project.

Does anyone have experience of this, and are there any reasonable, cost effective solutions out there?

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  • What happens after project delivery, when the project goes into production? Do you envisage needing to keep a record of extant bugs/allow people to raise new ones? Will you have to consider being able to import bugs back into the in-house solution at some point, or will you be able to just ditch (possibly archive) your bug db once the project is done?
    – testerab
    Jan 11, 2013 at 10:58
  • How many bugs are you expecting ? If you keep those low then simple hosted solutions are fine. Do you think you are going to need all the overhead if a traditional system ? ( and if so, why ? ) Jan 11, 2013 at 13:05

3 Answers 3

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Sounds like a hosted solution would best meet your needs.

Is that something your company's security policies will permit? And will you have time to gain permission to share bug reports externally?

Another alternative is to use your internal bug tracking system, but appoint someone to handle bugs found externally. Your third-party dev team sends bug reports to that person who files them internally on their behalf. And that person also publishes bug information to the third party periodically (perhaps through a spreadsheet).

I'd prefer a hosted solution if permitted. But I've used the internal-interface-person solution when dealing with customers (who would never be permitted direct access to our internal bug tracking system in my shop).

Good luck.

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  • Agreed. You can, for example, install a bug tracking system on an Amazon EC2 instance for not too much money. Amazon lets you restrict access to an instance by IP address. For most access control, you could of course insert a proxy (on the same machine) in front of that. But there may be companies that host dedicated bug tracking systems for even less.
    – user246
    Jan 11, 2013 at 17:11
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Is it possible to give your third party limited vpn access, especially only through a browser or some sort. Have their permissions locked down to only be able to access Share Point (or the tracker that you'd prefer) and then lock down their permissions within whatever application so that they can only access this project?

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  • How does this answer the OP's question?
    – Kate Paulk
    Aug 3, 2015 at 12:30

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