Bug Tracking Development Tools

By Author: Chris Aronivich
Total Articles: 2
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A bug tracker is an application, which is specifically designed to enhance software quality assurance and to serve as one of developer tools for tracking of reported bugs in the software. A large amount of bug tracker systems, mostly used within open source projects, allow adding bug reports directly. More complicated bug tracking systems are integrated in software management applications and are intended for usage in large organizations or software development companies. Successful implementation of bug trackers is of a much importance for large-scale software development projects. Bug tracking systems are an essential development tool for software development teams.

Typically, bug tracker consists of a set of major components, each of which serving for higher level of quality assurance. Database, which contains the list of reported bugs and detailed description for all of them, is one of these components. Ideally, report should represent all key information needed for bug detection and fixing it successfully, namely:

The name and identity of person who detected the bug;

Date and time when the bug was ...
... found and reported;

The severity of bug, as understood by the person who reports the bug. There are various ways of how severity level is determined. Simple ranking, as high/medium/low or 1/10 can be used. In this case higher priority means that this specific bug is more critical from the viewpoint of the reporting person. Another ranking system evaluates bugs from the viewpoint of criticality. In this case the ranking would be represented by a descriptive list, i.e. minor/improvement/usability/system crash;

Bug category, for instance, logic or usability;

General description of bug and software behavior;

Description of an environment, which is necessary to reproduce the bug;

Status - with a variety of options depending upon specific project team, from a pair of open/closed to a range of transitional statuses, i.e. new/feedback/confirmed/assigned/resolved/closed;

Developer or developers assigned to the bug.

As a rule, bug trackers support so-called bug lifecycle, i.e. tracking all stages of the process from applying bug report till fixing it successfully with the help of statuses that are assigned to the bug by administrator or any other authorized person. Administrators also may assign or change permissions related to a specific bug, change its status, complete or delete it. Advanced bug trackers have an email notifications system integrated, informing all involved parties about all changes related to the bug or the list of bugs.

Among other developer tools, bug tracker is of a critical importance for bug reproducibility. To analyze the environment, detect the bug and find successful method of fixing the bug, assigned developer needs detailed information, which is represented in bug report. Later, bug reports serves for retesting once bug is fixed by the developer.

One of the main benefits provided by a bug tracker as an effective developer tool is giving a clear view on development requirements, including both improvements and bugs and their relevant status in a real time mode. The list of bugs sorted by priority order provides an essential overview of the general development process, which is necessary for planning the subsequent stages of the product.

Being one of powerful development tools, bug trackers are also used for generating reports on developers' productivity at bug fixing in large companies or organizations. Local bug tracker is mostly used by software application support team to track bugs discussed with the software developers. In this case bug tracker also allows keeping information about users reporting bugs, and enables support team to give feedback on reported bugs in time effectively.

The article author is full-time professional information technology writer, primarily covering agile development methodologies. The author has published writings on, bug tracker systems, agile development software , agile tools, practices and iterative development.