It has been said that there is no software without bugs. The ones that look perfect surely have a few that haven't been noticed yet. Reporting bugs is really important for both software development companies and individual developers. This is why bug tracking and management systems were created. These applications assist developers to track their bugs and provide an opportunity for users to report them.
There are numerous bug tracking or issue tracking systems on the marketplace. As always when facing situations where we are supposed to pick a commercial application suite, we are first going to consider open source products. Thankfully, we’re lucky in this case because Bugzilla is a leading-edge defect-tracking and management system that is used by numerous high profile software development companies.
Throughout this article we’d like to give a brief overview of Bugzilla, answering questions such as: what are its main features? How can developers work with it? Does it integrate seamlessly? How do users interact with the system via the user interface? Meanwhile, we'll also mention a few other alternatives, but frankly, once deployed and placed in action, Bugzilla performs amazingly well.
A bit earlier we used the term “defect tracking” system. Most bug-tracking systems allow not only the management of “software bugs,” but also hardware issues, pre- and post-fabrication issues, all-around chip design, microprocessor architecture, and all kinds of general hardware design. Anything that is being manufactured can, unfortunately, have issues with it.
More often than not, an issue tracking system can help to increase productivity between the departments inside a company, as well as improve the communication that goes on (or should go on) between the developers and customers. Ultimately, adopting such a system within an organization gives an enormous benefit to the IT staff due to its additional deployment management and system administration features.
Therefore, if your company, institution, or organization is producing something, or engages in any sort of activity that creates and builds something from the ground up, then an issue-tracking system should be adopted. I have even seen someone mention that they are running a defect management system at their consulting firm.
