Bug Tracker 101: Everything You Need to Know
Key takeaways
- Bug tracking is the process of logging and monitoring bugs, issues, and defects in software testing.
- Having a bug tracker can simplify and enhance your debugging process by identifying bugs early, and reporting and monitoring appropriately based on their severity levels.
- A bug tracker can gather useful data about the bugs, providing insights on how to prevent them in the future.
- A bug tracker is different from help desk software as it is used internally by the companies to identify, monitor, and resolve bugs in their software products.
- Core features of a bug tracker include bug capture, bug prioritization, customized workflows, automated notifications, and API integrations.
Large enterprises will generally have hundreds, if not thousands of issues that need to be precisely monitored, evaluated, and prioritized for debugging. Some bugs or issues might be difficult to debug which are tracked for a longer period.
Bugs are unavoidable in software development projects so tracking them is crucial. The challenging part is keeping track of the bugs and managing them effectively. The number of bugs/defects can multiply over time, and you need a bug-tracking system to effectively manage them.
Every new tech and service has its fair share of bugs and issues which is why there is an entire marketplace full of tools to manage and track them. Instead of simply choosing a bug tracker a tech leader needs to be familiar with its features and functions to decide if it is the right one for them.
Table of Contents
What is Bug Tracking?
Bug tracking is the process where you log and monitor bugs, issues, and defects during a software testing pipeline.
Having a bug tracker, or an issue tracker tool can help you come up with easy ways to identify, file, monitor, and debug those errors. This is an interactive process as with every new version of your software/product gets updated and tested, it needs to be debugged. The bugs need to be tracked throughout its lifecycle and it will be challenging without the right tool.
The core functionalities of a bug tracker include:
- Submit and record detailed reports on bugs.
- Track bugs, assign them for resolution, and update their status.
- Facilitate communication between developers and testers regarding the issues.
- Provide summaries on bug trends and team performance.
- Find specific bugs quickly based on various criteria using search and filter.
The bugs can be detected in two ways:
Internal bug reporting
Before a product or software is launched, the QA team and developers test the code for bugs. A tester uses this approach to explore all possible use cases to see how the software would perform and find possible errors.
External bug reporting
Users face issues and errors when they use your product and therefore after your product is launched, you need to implement a help desk or support service where they can report such errors and get it resolved.
A slew of bug reports from both internal and external and external testing can swamp businesses. A well-defined bug-tracking process can empower QA teams to prioritize and work at their peak efficiency.
Difference between Bug Tracking and Help Desk software
Bug tracking and help desk software serve very similar purposes but with key differences. While bug tracking is like a mechanic’s log for car repairs, the help desk is like a customer service center for a car dealership.
| Bug tracker | Help desk |
|---|---|
| The target audience for bug tracking mainly includes internal development teams (QA and developers) | The target audience for help desk software primarily includes customers and internal users who need assistance. |
| Focuses on software malfunctions, bugs, defects, and errors that the QA team encounters while testing the product. | The help desk handles a wide range of issues such as feature requests, bug reports, usage questions, account issues, and other general inquiries. |
| Bug tracker prioritizes bugs, assigns them to the developers, tracks their progress through the debugging process (fix, test, release), and provides detailed reporting on the bugs and resolution times. | Provides ticketing systems to log and track issues, offers self-service knowledge bases, and FAQs, facilitates communication between your product developers and customers, and tracks resolution times for customer support inquiries. |
| The bug tracker is often deployed within the firewall of the company’s internal servers. | The help desk is accessible through web portals or mobile apps allowing external users to submit requests. |
Need for Bug Tracking
For every thousand lines of code, developers commit at least 100-150 errors on average. Overlooking even a tiny percentage of these errors can have serious consequences. While Excel can be simple and helpful, it has its limitations. Manually entering hundreds of bugs, categorizing them, and monitoring them every day can be time-consuming and overwhelming.
Are you reporting your bugs over email? Important information can get lost in the sea of mail threads and you will often end up wasting time in finding the crucial information.
This is why you will need an exclusive bug tracker to optimize your bug tracking, helping your team focus on important tasks – fixing high-priority bugs and issues.
How does bug tracking work?
When a bug occurs it indicates that the software doesn’t function as anticipated. When these bugs are adequately identified, monitored, and reported on time they can be resolved efficiently.
Keep in mind that you need a competent bug tracker. It needs to comprehensively record information about the bugs. The recorded data should have – the time of the bug reported, bug severity, details on how it affects the system, details of the reporter, and the person(s) responsible for debugging.
A single bug goes through multiple stages throughout its lifecycle. It includes:
- Active – the bug is being investigated
- Test – the bug has been fixed and the debugged software is ready for testing
- Verified – the bugs are retested and approved by the quality assurance (QA) engineer
- Closed – QA closes the resolved bugs
- Reopened – when the bug persists and is reactivated again.
In general, bugs are categorized based on their severity as it indicates the relative impact on your product. Some of the general forms of severity include:
- Low – these bugs can be ignored as they don’t have a noticeable impact on the system
- Minor – these bugs are capable of bringing some unexpected behavior but don’t disrupt the system.
- Major – these bugs are capable of significantly impacting larger parts of the system.
- Catastrophic – these bugs bring mass destruction as they can trigger complete system shutdown.
In general, the severity levels of bugs are tracked using a bug-tracking database. A good bug tracker should be incubated into the software development which gives better visibility of the error status and their potential impact on the product.
Key Features of a Bug Tracker
The effectiveness of the bug-tracking tool greatly influences your development process, so you must have a feature-rich robust product in hand.
Bug capture
A well-developed bug-tracking tool should facilitate the streamlined process of capturing bugs, tracking them, and resolving them efficiently.
A detailed bug report comprises:
- The bug title and its ID
- A brief description of the bug
- Steps to reproduce the bug
- Priority and severity levels
- Expected and unexpected results
- Additional information
These are the basic elements of a bug report but the bug summary is the crucial part. It offers a high-level overview of the issue, provides deeper insights on identifying and differentiating various bugs, and acts as a guide to mitigate them effectively. The bug tracking tool should help your developers organize all the information related to the bugs in the system efficiently.
Bug prioritization
Bug prioritization means the ability to sort them based on their priority and it is an essential metric in the software development process.
Bug prioritization helps teams organize their work more efficiently to focus on the more pressing bugs that can potentially harm user experience and significantly damage your product.
The priority of the bugs can be determined using different methods: by defect triage, assessing the severity, frequency of the bug occurrence, and level of security threat of the bug.
To do this, developers have to enter the necessary information about the bugs into the bug-tracking system. Based on the evaluations, testers should be able to analyze the bugs captured based on their priority levels.
Customized workflows
Each software development team has its unique way of handling bugs. Therefore, the bug tracking tool should have the ability to customize the workflows.
Customized workflows are one of the primary features of a bug tracking system. It allows teams to tailor their bug-tracking process to fit their debugging needs and optimize the bug management efforts as well.
Automated notifications
Efficiency is the key to bug tracking and management and you need to have a robust automated notification element in your tool to keep everyone involved in the process in the loop.
A developer working on a bug may not regularly check the board and tend to miss some updates. They may miss seeing the status of the bug changed from In progress to Closed. Another instance is where a developer might do redundant unnecessary work on a bug that is already tested and closed.
To avoid instances like these, your bug-tracking tool should have an automated notification feature. It will alert concerned developers working on a bug about the status changes, comments, and other relevant information.
Extensive dashboard
The bug tracking tool should offer a comprehensive dashboard for a visual understanding of the bug status. It is easy to comprehend making it easier for developers and stakeholders to stay updated and make informed decisions.
An inclusive dashboard should be able to piece together various information and should help teams monitor the progress, identify trends, address potential inefficiencies, and contribute more toward effective bug management and improved product quality.
API integrations
The bug-tracker is itself a powerful tool but it should be capable of integrating with third-party tools when needed to enhance the bug-tracking process.
Several tools such as project management, communication tools, and continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) tools such as Bitbucket and GitLab can be easily combined with a bug tracker.
Tips for choosing the best bug tracker
Customized software solutions:
Every business has its own unique bug-tracking needs. The best bug-tracking system is the one that is customizable and is precisely adequate for all your unique requirements. It includes custom templates, custom fields, custom bug statuses, custom views, custom domains, etc.
Automation:
The tools that you choose should help you work smarter, not harder. Choose a bug tracker that facilitates automating routine tasks such as issue statuses, escalating issues to ensure they are fixed in the specified time, and alerting concerned developers and QA.
Connect:
Choose the tool that will help bring all your favorite applications together such that your work gets done smoothly.
Work on the go:
The tool that you choose should come with a fully functional mobile app that lets you work on the go and stay connected with your team anywhere, anytime to keep you informed about updates.
End-to-end workflow automation
Build fully-customizable, no code process workflows in a jiffy.
Checklist To Improving Your Bug Tracking Process
- Report the bug in simple words with sufficient information.
- Assign a priority level to the bug
- Mention the expected result of the debugging
- Do not mix feature requests with bug reports
- Communicate and collaborate with the right people in your QA team
- Resolve the bug
The above checklist is created to improve your bug-tracking process.
- First, you need to check if the bug has already been reported. If not, just reporting won’t be enough. You need to justify by specifying the aspects of the bug. The information should be sufficient enough to include screenshots, error messages, URLs, etc. including the details of the environment where the bug was encountered.
- The second important thing is assigning a priority level to the bug as missing this will result in a critical flaw. Assigning priority levels will help developers know which one to work on first.
- When you prepare the bug report, make sure to include the expected result of the given scenario. The developer will get to know what the requirement is expected from the debugging.
- From a user perspective, there is no difference between a bug and a service request as they are all the same to them – an issue or a problem with your product. This is where the product manager has to find the balance between the two and make decisions accordingly. They should be able to segregate bug reports and feature requests to avoid misclassification and dilute metrics.
- Involve the right people when there is a higher-level decision for catastrophic bugs or a lower-level decision for minor bugs. Work with your team and communicate the expected results of the bugs and be specific.
- It is ideal to close the bug report by the one who initiated it. The QA team should test the bug in different environments and platforms and take the required action before marking the bug as resolved.
Why use Cflow’s bug-tracking workflow?
Ultimately, bugs are inevitable. All developers should have a robust bug tracker in place to catch the bugs proactively.
Cflow workflow is a powerful bug tracker that your company can use to add and maintain issues, track the progress, and resolve issues.
While you may be comfortable with spreadsheets for a while, eventually your development tool will feel stuck!
Cflow offers more than just a bug-tracking workflow, it is a project management and workflow automation tool. It can help, improve and maintain software as well as integrate your bug fixing issues with your team’s projects effortlessly.
When you integrate Cflow with your other cloud-based apps, it creates a collaborative ecosystem for your team. They can work towards identifying bugs, and track and monitor them all in a single place.
Sign up for a free demo today and we’ll show you how things get done. Try Cflow’s powerful bug tracker and experience the change.
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