Tracking system or defect tracking system is a

software application Application software is any computer program that is intended for end-user use not computer operator, operating, system administration, administering or computer programming, programming the computer. An application (app, application program, sof ...

that keeps track of reported

software bug A software bug is a design defect ( bug) in computer software. A computer program with many or serious bugs may be described as ''buggy''. The effects of a software bug range from minor (such as a misspelled word in the user interface) to sev ...

s in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as those used by most

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projects, allow end-users to enter bug reports directly. Other systems are used only internally in a company or organization doing

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

. Typically bug tracking systems are integrated with other project management software. A bug tracking system is usually a necessary component of a professional software development infrastructure, and consistent use of a bug or issue tracking system is considered one of the "hallmarks of a good software team".

Making

A major component of a bug tracking system is a

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that records facts about known bugs. Facts may include the time a bug was reported, its severity, the erroneous program behavior, and details on how to reproduce the bug; as well as the identity of the person who reported it and any programmers who may be working on fixing it. Typical bug tracking systems support the concept of the life cycle for a bug which is tracked through the status assigned to the bug. A bug tracking system should allow administrators to configure permissions based on status, move the bug to another status, or delete the bug. The system should also allow administrators to configure the bug statuses and to what extent a bug in a particular status can be moved. Some systems will e-mail interested parties, such as the submitter and assigned programmers, when new records are added or the status changes.

Usage

The main benefit of a bug-tracking system is to provide a clear centralized overview of development requests (including both bugs and improvements; the boundary is often fuzzy), and their state. The prioritized list of pending items (often called backlog) provides valuable input when defining the product road map, or maybe just "the next release". In a corporate environment, a bug-tracking system may be used to generate reports on the productivity of programmers at fixing bugs. However, this may sometimes yield inaccurate results because different bugs may have different levels of severity and complexity. The severity of a bug may not be directly related to the complexity of fixing the bug. There may be different opinions among the managers and architects. A ''local bug tracker (LBT)'' is usually a

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used by a team of application support professionals (often a help desk) to keep track of issues communicated to software developers. Using an LBT allows support professionals to track bugs in their "own language" and not the "language of the developers." In addition, an LBT allows a team of support professionals to track specific information about users who have called to complain—this information may not always be needed in the actual development queue. Thus, there are two tracking systems when an LBT is in place.

Part of integrated project management systems

Bug and issue tracking systems are often implemented as a part of integrated project management systems. This approach allows including bug tracking and fixing in a general product development process, fixing bugs in several product versions, automatic generation of a product

knowledge base In computer science, a knowledge base (KB) is a set of sentences, each sentence given in a knowledge representation language, with interfaces to tell new sentences and to ask questions about what is known, where either of these interfaces migh ...

and release notes.

Distributed bug tracking

Some bug trackers are designed to be used with distributed revision control software. These distributed bug trackers allow bug reports to be conveniently read, added to the database or updated while a developer is offline.

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and Veracity both include distributed bug trackers. Recently, commercial bug tracking systems have also begun to integrate with

distributed version control In software development, distributed version control (also known as distributed revision control) is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developer's computer. Compared to centr ...

. FogBugz, for example, enables this functionality via the source-control tool, Kiln. Although

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

s and bug tracking systems are conventionally viewed as distinct types of software, ikiwiki can also be used as a distributed bug tracker. It can manage documents and code as well, in an integrated distributed manner. However, its query functionality is not as advanced or as user-friendly as some other, non-distributed bug trackers such as Bugzilla. Similar statements can be made about org-mode, although it is not wiki software as such.

Bug tracking and test management

While traditional test management tools such as HP Quality Center and IBM Rational Quality Manager come with their own bug tracking systems, other tools integrate with popular bug tracking systems.

References

External links

How to Report Bugs Effectively
by Simon Tatham
List of distributed bug tracking software
{{Bug tracking systems Bug tracking system Help desk Project management software