I have written about "Should Wolfram Mathematica consider a public bug tracker?" where I already laid out some of the points.
Which issue tracking software?
There are some really nice tools out there like YouTrack, FogBugz or Jira. The biggest issue with them is that they are charging by numbers of users which might become a problem when this is going to be a tracker open to many users. For instance, using Jira Server self-hosted with 10k+ users costs almost $50k.
Therefore, we shouldn't forget that while Atlassian using Jira doesn't cost them a dime, for a company like WRI this endeavour will be quite expensive. However, we must emphasize that tools like YouTrack are battle-tested for many years with an incredible amount of issues and users. Here is my top 3 list of commercial issue trackers:
There are two more things to mention: I have the impression that the pricing for the products is made for teams and not for having a public issue tracker with external users. I'm almost sure that, e.g. JetBrains gives a different quote with such things, but one has to ask. Secondly, most of these tools include many more things and not only a bug tracker. Usually, they try to sit in the centre of the entire development process.
On the open-source side of issue tracking, we don't have so many choices. The ones that come to mind are
I have no experience with them and, frankly, they look a bit weird when you are used to GitHub or YouTrack.
My personal choice would be JetBrains YouTrack since I have used it for a long time and I'm convinced it is the right tool for the job.
What features do I consider important?
- Writing markdown in issues and comments
- Including images and attaching notebooks
- Commenting on issues
- Linking related issues and marking duplicates
- Voting on issues!
- Meta information: Status of the bug, developer, version affected, estimate on a fix
- Good search capabilities