Use and Abuse of the Bug Tracker
Although there seems to be an increasing number of teams who opt not to use bug trackers, the vast majority of information technology shops still use them. If you are going to use a bug tracker, it's important to be aware of what it is—and is not—good at and to use it in ways that play to a bug tracker's strengths rather than trying to make it do something it can't.
Bug trackers model defects as discrete objects, each of which is completely orthogonal to every other defect. They are good at holding on to discrete bits of information, such as the bugs that have been filed, where they are in the resolution workflow, and who is currently responsible for them. However, bug trackers do a poor job of painting a picture of the entire project—at filling in the cracks between these individual data points.
What does this in-between space encompass? Well, bug trackers have a very hard time retrieving a list of bugs to satisfy fuzzy criteria (e.g., all bugs that make it hard for international users to edit content). They only convey the severity of bugs in an approximate way Complex, multifaceted defects get their differences papered over with generic severity labels like major and trivial.
Finally, bug trackers have great difficulty pointing out how multiple bugs interact. This is especially problematic since many defects have a greater impact on the project when taken together than they do when considered in isolation.
We run into problems when we neglect these in-betweens and assume that the data points in the bug tracker present the whole picture. This is where testers come in. Testers know what bugs are outstanding and their impact on the software.
Presenting this in a way that makes sense to the rest of the team is what Michael Bolton calls telling the story of the project. Conveying what outstanding defects mean in terms of their effect on the user and risk to the project is one of the most important contributions the test team can provide.
What have you observed when it comes to weaknesses in how bug tracking is used? What methods do you use to keep everybody aware of the overall state of the project? Click the Comment on this story link below to add your thoughts.
