Making the Case for Better Bugtracking Tools?

WeNeedBetterTools asks: "Help! I am trying to convince the leaders of my development organization that the quality of our bugtracking tool has a meaningful impact on the quality of products we produce. Right now, the tool we have is difficult to use because there is a high overhead to creating bugs, and they are very difficult to find in the system once they're reported. My main argument is that the easier the tool is to use, the more people will be motivated to enter bugs. My managers argue that if people aren't entering bugs, it's their own damn problem, and we ought to crack the whip until they always file every bug they possibly can. I need some solid references for my position. JoelOnSoftware has a great argument for making it simple to enter bugs, but he lacks credibility with my managers by virtue of the fact that he is also selling a bugtracking tool. Can anyone point me to any solid research on the relationship between the quality of bugtracking tool and the impact on product quality?"

Comments

Been there...

[walt-sjc]

The problem is larger than just the ease of use of the tool. The more people you have entering bugs the more they are going to get categorized wrong, and the more dupes you are going to have, etc.

Assign someone in QA as the "bugmaster". Possibly rotate the responsability between team members so you don't get burnout.

Have people email bug reports to the bugmaster and have that person enter the bugs into the system the correct way. Yeah, it can be a lot of work for the bugmaster depending on the size of the system, but the QUALITY of the data will be vastly improved.

Trust me on this. A tool will not fix a process problem, no matter HOW easy a tool is to use. If you ARE choosing a new tool, make sure that ANY tool you use is web-browser usable for ALL functionality (avoid IE only, active-x required tools)

use talkback

[scrytch]

god only knows where you can get the talkback quality feedback agent (fullcircle.com is a different company now) but you can put something similar into your app. Build for your internal dev folks an extra info field in so that they can add notes to the reports. Add a "report bug" menu option to the app, and make it only require a very few options to fill in (system affected, severity, summary, and notes). Give out a prize for the person who reports the most bugs (we are assuming professionals are not going to spam you with bogus reports). Pay for the prize yourself if you have to (it could be a big candy bar or $10 gift cert for starters) then get management to pay for it once you get things going.

Don't kvetch endlessly about specifics in the interface, just say "it needs to be easy and fast to report bugs. average time to file a bug report (now): xxx minutes. goal: xxx seconds."