As the magnitude of the software development projects grow, so does the number of test cycles, and the count of people involved in the project. Thus, it becomes absolutely necessary to shift from a simple spreadsheet to a more robust and sophisticated mechanism to make the management and tracking of issues simpler and consistent. To cater to the changing requirements, the quality assurance managers have adopted effective bug management tools for issue tracking and defect management in their systems.

Basics of Bug Management Software

Any software or system that claims to be a standard bug management tool, it is imperative for it have some essential features including;

–  The reporting feature which allows the users to provide insights and feedback about the issues, module, severity of the impact, and environment, which is available to all team members.

–   The ability to allocate and assign issues to the right team members and keep track of their progress.

–   A personalized or a standard workflow that progresses through the development cycle stages.

–   Storage of the history of the bugs, comments made by the manager or team members, and work log.

–   Visual representation of the insights and test results in the form of graphs and charts.

–  Similar as to the entities in the testing process which have a unique identity, the same is the case with the bug management systems. With the storage and retrieval feature, the bug management system must have a unique ID for every issue which helps in storing, searching, and organizing the information.

How Bug Management System Ensures Better Quality for Software Development Projects

As opposed to the manual spreadsheets, an effective bug management system offers real time visibility for the bug tracking and progress report. With the collaboration of the teams and customizable workflow, the team is notified of the issue as soon as it is discovered or alerted if the said issue has been retested in real time. Owing to the inbuilt alerting feature, the defects and bugs are brought to the attention of the team even if they haven’t been sought after. In addition to that, the availability of a central repository, organizations are able to sort the bug related information and data in the desired modules and sections. With the simple search, the users would be able to retrieve the bug and its history, comments, previous work done to resolve the issue, etc.

Since the bug management system reduces the team effort and investment in monitoring, measuring, and keeping track of all the issues in the software, they are able to spend more time on the development aspect, hence improving the quality. Apart from the more obvious benefits, with the productive use of this system in an agile framework, the organizations are able to gain deeper understanding of the system under the testing layer and a comprehensive understanding of defect trends. Moreover, it also allows them insights in the defect reporting standards, while preventing replicas and unsound suggestions.