Open Testware Reviews

Mantis

Copyright 2004 by Tejas Software Consulting - All rights reserved.

Contents

Overview -- Observations -- Maturity -- Project activity -- Platforms -- Support -- Documentation -- Installation -- Implementation -- Performance -- Similar tools -- Limitations

Overview

Reviewer: Danny R. Faught
Date reviewed: 2004-05-31
Version reviewed: 0.18.2
Maintainer: Kenzaburo Ito and a team of 10 other developers
URL: http://www.mantisbt.org/
Testingfaqs.org category: Defect Tracking Tools
License: GNU GPL v. 2
User interface: web

Mantis is a web-based bug tracking tool that can run on many different platforms. It's written in PHP and uses the MySQL database. It was written by Kenzaburo Ito and was handed off to a team of volunteer developers around 2002. Here's a screen shot:

Observations

Mantis includes a basic set of bug tracking features for a software project. Its main appeal is its simplicity.

Bug reporting is fairly straightforward. A simple form comes up by default. The simple form doesn't include the "Product Version" field, which is something that I always like to see in a bug report. You can switch to the advanced report, which adds fields for product version, operating system, plus several others that I wouldn't typically use. You can add custom fields, but the options for customizing built-in fields are limited. Some basic features, such as searching, aren't available for custom fields.

Browsing existing bugs is not difficult. There are several filters at the top of the View Bugs page that can help you focus on the bugs you want to look at. But more sophisticated searching is not supported, like listing bugs opened or closed within a certain date range. There is a CSV export feature that could allow you to use another program to do more sophisticated reporting, but it doesn't include enough of the fields to be very useful. You might find yourself directly querying the database to get decent reports (it's not unusual to resort to this when using a commercial bug tracking tool, too).

I had trouble getting email notifications to work. There are several ways to customize email delivery, including replacing PHP's standard mail function with PHPMailer (which I didn't try). Questions about email notification problems were fairly frequent on the mantisbt-help mailing list. In my case, I was using a server that is not normally used to deliver email, and that compounded the problem. Given enough time to properly configure the server and Mantis's email options, it looks like the email problems can be solved.

I noticed several nifty features.

• The product version field has an enumeration that the administrator sets up to limit the choices. Each value has a timestamp that determines the order that they show up in the list, which is nice if the version labels aren't in alphanumeric order.
  
• There is a profile feature for the platform, operating system, etc. that can speed up bug reporting for the platforms that you usually report against.
• You can set up multiple projects in the database, and users can view bugs in all of their projects at once if they want to.
• Mantis can use the JpGraph library to draw graphs if you install it. The documentation is sketchy on what kinds of graphs are supported
• Mantis has been localized for several different languages.
  

Version 0.18.3 was released during the course of my review. According to the release notes, the changes focus on fixing security vulnerabilities and improving the CSV export feature.

Maturity

4 - Beta (on a scale of 1-5)

Project activity

5 - Very active (on a scale of 1-5)

Five releases in the past year, counting one beta release. Releases have been decelerating over the past few years, so an "Active" rating may not be too far away.

There is a good level of community activity. Traffic on the mantisbt-help user-level mailing list is fairly light but consistent. Traffic on the mantisbt-dev mailing list for developers seems to be bursty, with no messages some months and a peak of 240 messages in February 2003.

Platforms

Mantis requires a web server (Apache, IIS, and others will work), PHP 4.0.2+ and MySQL 3.23.2+. Several different operating systems can run Mantis, including Windows, MacOS, OS/2, Linux, Solaris, and BSD. Disk usage requirements are fairly light if users don't upload large attachments. I did not find any limitations on the client platforms that can be used to access the web interface.

Support

Documentation

Installation

Mantis installs from a compressed tar file that's just over half a megabyte, expanding to about 2.5 megabytes when installed. I later saw that Mantis is also available as a Debian package using apt-get. Installing Mantis requires some administrator-level knowledge of the MySQL database, the PHP scripting language, and your web server.

The documentation doesn't offer any help in installing MySQL or creating the database for Mantis, though I found these steps fairly simple when I installed the Debian package for MySQL and found the appropriate documentation for creating a database. I had no experience with MySQL or PHP before I started. The most confusing part was setting up MySQL user accounts, which I still don't quite understand. After this point, the Mantis installation documentation was very helpful.

PHP was easy to install on Linux along with the Apache web server. I did have to install an extra extension so PHP could connect to the database (the php4-mysql package).

I tried to install Mantis on a Windows XP box that's also running Apache, accessing the database on the Linux server. But installing PHP was more difficult than it was on Linux, and I lost interest before I got it working.

There's an "Upgrade your installation" link on the administration page that updates the database schema when you upgrade to a newer version of Mantis.

Implementation

Mantis is about 18,000 lines of PHP code, according to SLOCCount. Some files are well-commented, but other files are commented only sparsely. I did not see any test cases, though there is a diagnostic page in the admin directory that provides useful information and an email delivery test.

Performance

Similar tools

Limitations

• Email notifications can be difficult to configure. This seems to be a frequent source of problems for users.
• The CSV export and other reports do not include nearly enough information for moderately sophisticated analysis.
• Mantis is not very robust, with many unhelpful error messages, and sometimes it fails silently. The common paths through the code worked fairly consistently, but if you push into the corner you may encounter problems.