Software Development Tools

Part III: Defect Tracking

Much of this presentation is taken from Scooter's PowerPoint slides

During software development, programmers (and managers) will need to keep track of:
- what features need to be implemented
- how far they got in the implementation
- what remains to be done: milestone and release dates
- good ideas that won't be implemented yet but shouldn't be lost
After software has been deployed, users may need to:
- report problems
- find whether others have seen similar problems
- find fixes and workarounds
- ask for new features

Support for flexible issue definitions
- Bugs, "tracking" bugs, feature requests, milestones, releases, ...
- Ability to define attributes for issues such as project, category, severity, priority, ...
Good reporting tools
- Generate dependency tree generation
- Time-to-fix, outstanding bugs, bugs fixed since last release, etc.
- Milestones and progress towards completion
Support multiple interface types
- Web-based programmer/manager dashboard
- Web-based bug submission and search forms
- E-mail notification of updates and fixes
- Discussion forums

Bugzilla
- Bug tracker for Mozilla, Apache, Linux, etc.
- Perl-based with MySQL backend
- Very flexible but requires effort to set up and maintain
Mantis
- Bug tracker for Cytoscape
- PHP-based with MySQL backend
Trac
- Bug tracker for Chimera
- Python-based with MySQL backend
- A combination of defect tracking and wiki, with interface to Subversion
Many, many others