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.
Get Practical Development Environments now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
