Finding bugs in the development process is crucial, without doing so, it’s difficult to envision the normal operation of a finished application.
The process of finding bugs, analysing the cause, and then solving what the problem is a difficult task that can take time. Thankfully there are plenty of various bug search systems, but sometimes it’s hard to recognise one from another and learn which option is more suited.
Firstly, whats Bug Tracking?
The process of a bug tracking is finding, identifying those and then fixing them, but as well find any other problems with your application.
So basically, you are looking for that part of the code that prevents your application from working normally. This may sound like a barrel of laughs, but you’ll quickly realise that you need to efficiently solve the issue to provide your client with the best application.
Starting to track
There are two options to create a bug tracking workflow.
The first option is, External reporting; When you’ve created the application, you can then start finding out (from a user focus group) what precisely is working incorrectly, and where to start fixing.
And the other option is, Internal reporting; Before releasing the complete application, you ought to run internal testing, during this specific process, QAs (quality assurance officer) and the developers will analyse each piece of code and find existing bugs and errors.
Bug Report Writing.
Before commencing to use a bug tracking system, its essential to learn what should be included in the bug report and how such a piece should look.
As a result, you’ll need to quickly and correctly deal with bugs in the application. This means that you’ll need to have all the necessary information for fast and efficient work. The more you understand, the quicker you can identify, diagnose, and deal with any issues.
A quality bug search system can do various things for you. Due to strong management, some flexibility will be shown in your work. The bug system itself will place the priorities of bugs based on how difficult their outcomes are.
Prioritising Bugs
It’s so important to recognise how a bug is reproduced. You should give some amount of time to find information on this topic, such as the version of the app or what browser been used.
Make a list of existing bugs with a short description of each, and fix them one at a time, you can make a list in excel, although creating a list in excel you will notice that you will get tired and probably lose pace quickly.
Most possible, you’ll need an appropriate tool that will detect bugs. So using it, you and anyone who is on your team can be able to save hours that would go into the regular processes.
So, now let’s choose a bug tracking tool for your project?
1. Trac
Trac is an open-source web-based tool that combines both a wiki and issue tracking system for particular web/software development projects.
This tool has been embraced by numerous developers for its software development projects.
Trac has a simple to use interface and it can be used for documents and management. Plus it can also integrate with version control systems regarding Git and Subversion.
And it further allows wiki markup in issue descriptions and commits messages that are here to create relations and references between tasks, bugs, changesets, files, and coarse wiki pages. Lastly, this tool is a lightweight and stable system, but nevertheless, you may miss out on features that are offered by other bug tracking tools.
Price: Free
2. Jira
Developed by Atlassian an Australian based software company, JIRA is a popular project tracking tool.
This tool helps users to capture, assign, and prioritise the bugs and update them for later analyses. And it can integrate with the coding interface, making it an suitable choice for developers. With a flexible and productive toolkit that is in-built in the software, makes it a favourite bug tracking software of many.
Lastly, it has a strong set of APIs, so JIRA can be integrated with almost all tools your team uses.
Price: Free, to $14 per user (average) $140 a month
3. Mantis Bug Tracker
Mantis is an incredible web-based tool that is simple to use error tracking system, that been developed in PHP available free of cost. Mantis is an open-source system that works in collaboration with different databases, particularly MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. to track errors and bugs.
Also integrates with applications such as chatting, time-tracking, wiki, RSS feeds and more to keep a check on their unique behaviour.
Price: Free
4. Bugzilla
This is a Mozilla Foundation established web-based bug tracker and testing tool that allows users to log and track defects, bugs, and errors in its product efficiently.
This tool is a feature-rich application that comes with some awesome features such as advanced search capabilities, scheduled reports, bug lists in multiple formats with the capability to file/modify bugs, patch viewer, time tracking etc.
Price: Free
5. BugHerd
Bugherd is a web-based bug tracking and project management tool that been specifically designed and built for both developers and designers. Bugs are organised in four types of listing: Backlog, To Do, and Doing and Done. When enabling the testing team it will keep up with the status of various tasks.
The advanced tool captures a screenshot of the roadblock and counting the exact HTML component being annotated.
Price: From $39.00 per month to $109.00 per month
6. ReQtest
ReQTest is an external cloud-based testing tool with a bug tracker capacity, this tool also offers all-extensive test management that has features that give your testing team the capacity to detect the progress of testing in real-time. As it is “an Agile board” that offers an efficient method to visualise tasks and collaborate easily.
This tool gets used by User acceptance testers (UAT) and also ReQTest is mostly preferred by big organisations and even small development teams as well, as the tool has no annoyances such as installation or maintenance the tool with installing updates.
Price: $6.00 to $45.00 per user