Integration Watch: Defect tracking springs to life
November 15, 2009 —
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If interest in technology were mapped to a terrain, it would be notable for its steep peaks and deep valleys. The areas of intense interest, such as Web 2.0 programming, Web frameworks, dynamic languages and concurrency, would be towering peaks; the valleys, where advances are few and the interest they generate is low, would comprise defect-tracking systems (DTS), source code management (SCM) systems, and debuggers.
But every once in a while, sleepy sectors stir to life, even spring to life. For example, I was a Jolt judge for years in the SCM category. We prayed for the most minor of innovations from year to year so that we’d have some reason to pick one of the perennial contenders.
Then, out of the blue, SCM tools became a hotbed of innovation for one year—2005—when there appeared in quick succession Bazaar, Mercurial and Git. And SCM was changed forever.
DTS has not enjoyed a renaissance quite like that of SCM. However, this year, I’ve seen more activity in this sector than usual. There have been new products entering the space and important new releases from market leaders. Before getting into these changes, I need to discuss why this market remains persistently sleepy. The reason is homegrown systems.
Almost all DTS vendors I speak with aver that their biggest competitor is not another vendor, but homebrewed systems. These range from spreadsheets and simple databases to large monstrosities that are tended by a team of programmers and administrators. It is one sector of technology where the buy-don’t-build-infrastructure dictum has not been widely accepted. And in almost all cases, this works to the detriment of the IT organization.
There are manifold reasons why writing your own DTS system is a poor idea:
• Your developers are not producing while they’re building DTS functionality that duplicates commercial offerings.
• The final product is likely to be highly customized to your needs but exceedingly brittle. Any change will require coding, rather than configuration.
• Scalability is hard to establish.
• Import and export options, support for industry-standard protocols, and hooks to other tools are rarely implemented—and when implemented are generally only the subset the organization needs right then.
Related Search Term(s): defect tracking, SCM
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