Overview

This section discusses general issues related to tracking defects, and how these issue are addressed by ProblemTracker features. If you are not familiar with defect tracking, or do not have a particular development process in mind, this section can serve as a good general introduction to the subject and starting point for customizing ProblemTracker to your needs.

Defect Tracking

The defect tracking is the process by which a company accepts change requests to a product (could be a bug report, a feature enhancement, etc.) and handles each request across multiple organizations (engineering, QA, etc.) each of which must perform some task to complete the handling of the change request.

Some key issues in designing an effective defect tracking process are:

Data Record
What data must be kept to allow the request to be correctly and completely processed?

Workflow
What steps are required to process the request, and what organizations should be assigned responsibility for each step? What data must be entered at each step?

Notification
At each step, who should the request be assigned to for processing, and who should be notified of significant events?

Security
How trusted is each user of the system? What operations are required at each step of the process?

A successful defect tracking process answers these questions and describes a life cycle for each request such that every request is accounted for and all requests are processed as required by the needs of the organization. ProblemTracker is an application that provides the framework for implementing such a process in an organization.