Why is defect tracking important

Some agile teams document their defects by creating user stories. Itay Ben-Yehuda recommends against this , claiming that these defect-related stories will get lost in the backlog and take a backseat to new feature work.

Other agile teams may take the approach that bugs must be fixed immediately and thus don't need to be tracked. Storing it only prolongs the pain and possibility of repercussion later," says Amy Reichert. Many agile teams take the approach that if a bug is found and fixed in code being developed during the current sprint, they don't need to track it.

Otherwise, it needs to be tracked. Clearly, the usability of your defect-tracking tool is a big factor in how successful your team will be in using the tool to its advantage. Often, the team doesn't have a choice in the tools they use or the standards set by the governance team. How much flexibility they have depends on the organization. However, if a tool has been selected, it would be advantageous for someone on the team to become a super-user and take advantage of configuring the tool to make it as user friendly for the team as possible, perhaps by adding templates or canned reports.

Teams need to work together to decide when defects will be tracked, as well as discuss any related processes or guidelines, such as how much information must be tracked for each ticket. Optimize these processes for communication, flow, and quality.

Continually evaluate during retrospectives and adapt your processes over time. Every software development team needs to have a process for how to handle defects.

Whether your tools are as simple as sticky notes or as complex as an integrated application lifecycle management tool suite, decide as a team how to use the tools and create the processes that will work best for you. Take a deep dive into the state of quality with TechBeacon's Guide. Plus: Download the free World Quality Report Put performance engineering into practice with these top 10 performance engineering techniques that work. Discover best practices for reducing software defects with TechBeacon's Guide.

Test manager or project manager needs to carefully track the reported bugs and make sure that no bug remains unfixed. Defect management process can become a cumbersome process if simple spreadsheets are used. A defect management tool enables you to ease your defect management process. There are several defect tracking software available which provide powerful features to effectively manage defect life cycle, such as:. Keeping the limitations of current defect tracking tools and the unmet needs of quality assurance team, we can conclude that the software defect tracking is heading towards new, improved and more powerful features.

In the next five years, we will see a powerful search and filter features in the defect tracking software. At present, several defect tracking tools provide the facility of assigning bug to an iteration version, assigned to person, assigned by, priority level and a bug status. You can also attach customized tags to your bug reports in some tools. This information builds up the filter facility of the defect tracking tool. Although it facilitates the tester, but testers are still looking forward towards a more powerful yet simple search feature.

There is a need to define intelligent search algorithms like google search. One of the major challenge testers face today is reporting of duplicate bugs. This might discourage a tester. Also, it adds to the effort of testing team and developers. If duplicate bugs are reported frequently in a project, it results in frustration for the team members.

The limitation with current defect tracking tools in software testing is the inability to recognize a duplicate bug report.

This is a very challenging feature to devise. A simple comparison of description of current bugs with all the previously reported bugs would not serve the purpose. First, it would be very inefficient approach. Defect tracking tools need more powerful and intelligent algorithms to be able to flag warning when a duplicated bug is reported. In that scenario, the tester would be able to either keep the duplicated bug or reject it. Tester would also desire the ability to merge the description of bugs.

Defect tracking system is heading towards a tighter coupling of requirements with defects. At present, many defect tracking tools in software testing can be integrated with the project management and team management tools. In the future, we are looking forward to a complete requirements and defect tracking suite instead of a standalone software.

The anticipated suite would enable the user to enter the requirements and user stories during the requirements phase. In the testing phase, testing team would be able to raise bugs associated with those requirements. It would develop a single view where users can see the requirements and its implementation status. Sometimes developers complain that a reported bug does not contain enough information.

This is because every person in the testing team does not have the same knowledge base and experience. Some members may be novice, while others are experienced.

Similarly, there is a difference in the details and description of the reported bug. Experienced testers know what information is required and useful to developers. On the other hand, novice tester may rely on writing a superficial description without much clue to the root cause. It would be remarkable if the defect tracking tools can provide cues to the inexperienced reported what information they can provide and how they can collect it. You might be familiar that several test management tools provide testers have ability to record a test scenario and play it.

If a test scenario fails, it facilitates the user to generate a bug report using the description provided in the test case.

We anticipate a similar feature in the defect tracking software in the next 5 years. Currently, testers add text description of the bug and attach videos or screenshots with it. In future, we want a feature that could allow the testers to reproduce and record a bug; defect tracking software would be intelligent enough to note down the steps followed and add a screenshot of each step.

It might also save the recording of the defect, so the developers would have the choice to either see the video or follow the text description. Defect tracking software of today are independent of the application being tested. Defect tracking systems are applications that were created to simplify the process of defect tracking.

Before their invention, the software development teams had to conduct defect tracking without using any technical means.

Now the process is much simpler. To track defects the developers have to find them. Usually that is made in the process of testing. Sometimes the testing process may involve final users.

In such cases they have to estimate the product and report on its bugs. In other cases the team conducts testing and detects defects themselves. Such an approach requires greater time amounts, but it helps to detect defects more effectively.

After the defect is found, all the data on it is placed in the defect tracking system, which creates defect reports and defect lists automatically. Please be polite. We appreciate that.

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