Chapter 7. Tracking Bugs


This chapter is about keeping track of bugs in software products. Doing this well turns out to be one of the harder things for a development environment. Few people ever seem to really like using their bug tracking system, perhaps because different groups of people want very different things from the same bug tracking system. Bug tracking systems are one example of collaborative tools, which help groups of people work together efficiently on many small tasks. Similar systems include the tools that help customer support teams track customers' issues and the tools that help a salesforce coordinate its efforts, but those tools are outside the scope of this book.

The first part of this chapter discusses what kinds of things you might want a bug tracking system to do for you. The second part describes six different bug tracking systems: spreadsheets, Bugzilla, GNATS, FogBugz, JIRA, and TestTrack. The last part of the chapter discusses some commonly encountered annoyances of bug tracking systems and has some suggestions for how to avoid the worst of these. Most of these suggestions are independent of any particular bug tracking system.

Bug or Feature?

Feedback on a product comes in all shapes and sizes. Forcing everything to be classified as a bug often produces strong responses from developers. For example, "That's not a bug because the product is working exactly as designed!" You can classify such things as bugs in the design stages of the product, but since no one can predict all the changes in a product's requirements, a better approach is to classify them as feature requests or requests for enhancement (RFEs). Another type of entry that is sometimes present in a bug tracking system is an inquiry, which can later become source material for FAQs and other documentation.

It's hard work to sell products that have known bugs, faults, or failures, but products with unresolved issues, anomalies, artifacts, or even potential defects somehow sound better to prospective customers. You may even come across some products with design side effects! Be careful when you choose your own euphemisms, making sure that everyone knows exactly what the words mean for your project. Also, note that the terms defect and incident can have unforeseen legal consequences. For simplicity, the term used in the rest of this book is the good old Anglo-Saxon bugfrom the Anglo-Saxon budda, meaning "beetle" (http://alt-usage-english.org).




Practical Development Environments
Practical Development Environments
ISBN: 0596007965
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 150

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