Bug Tracking Tool
Work in progress

or Why it is not possible to manage any software development without a bug tracking tool

A bug tracking system is basically a database linked to a frontend:

The frontend can be a FAT client, understand a windows or application running on your pc and that need to be install by each developer/client, or may be
Adhering to a light client server model: HTML frontend which submit queries to a server.

Provide

Tracability

When was the bug open, and closed, what is its status now. Who has reported it (login is required and all system support profile (user, tester, manager, developer, administrator) and/or isolation of project). Did It already existed in a previous version (regression in code), etc...

Responsability

Easily dispatch responsability or find quickly who was reponsible for solving it, how much time was needed to close this bug, some system may send email automatically to developer to inform them... etc...

Effort

How difficult will it be to solve this issues, (can be a bugnote add by other developer). Most of the time, technical leader decide of the value of this field together with developers.

Priorities

How many bugs are still open at a date "t", how do I determine the order in which I will solve them...etc

Standardisation of records

By forcing tester/customer to enter some mandatory fields in a graphical forms. It may avoid You to hear some ridiculous statement like: "the application is not printing, working". It force the user talking a language You have decide together, having agreed on a "bug category" list is a very good and common example.

Customization

All modern bug tracking tool let You define and customize some part of the system according to your need.

Addition of information

A screenshot is better than thousand word, a file create by the application, a memory dump, anything that will help developer to reproduce the bug.

Statistics/Reporting

A lot of very powerful queries can be executed. It is always interesting to know, how many improvement were done in the next/past releases, or if a team has use more power to develop new functionnalities (also changes request which interest the customer the most) or loose time tracking some low level bug priority.
In case of reporting, Bugzilla support the following:

Tabular reports - tables of bug counts in 1, 2 or 3 dimensions, as HTML or CSV.

Graphical reports - line graphs, bar and pie charts.

Al of the above will have a positive result on:

communication among the team of developers and customers,
It will improve the product quality by several magnitude,
Developer will be more productive as the will know what to concentrate on or what is worth to do.

AND Your customers will be happier!!

Golden rules

A bug that can be reproduce can be analysed/corrected.
Correcting a bug is not always trivial, a correction may introduce new bugs.
The intrinseque quality of a software is always improved with a tracking tool over time

Some open source software:

	Bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org/) is the more famous, use in a lot of open source application (Mozilla, Apache, and even eclipse) version 2.19.2 (MySQL+PHP, Solaris, Linux, Win32, MacOS X, BSD) 370 companies are currently using it. (Nasa, IBM, Mozilla and others)- Wikipedia has a very brief article on it, Features are listed here
	Mantis. (http://mantisbt.sourceforge.net/) A very simple bug tracking tool with limited search functionnality compared to bugzilla, a strong community but not so much stable release as expected.
	Buggit (http://www.matpie.drw.net/PBSystems/products/buggit/Buggit.html) no new release since 2000 and bounded to MS access, aka running only unde windows. Listed Here because I use to play with it in 2001.