Defect-Tracking Tools: Price Vs. Performance
Users want more controls, more integration, but balk as complexity, costs begin to climb
February 15, 2004 —
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The days of the stand-alone defect-tracking system may be numbered. As software projects continue to become more complex, and as development teams become more heterogeneous and widely dispersed, development managers are looking beyond individual point solutions, preferring instead broader systems that extend beyond bug tracking, feature requests and other issues.
The days of the stand-alone defect-tracking system may be numbered. As software projects continue to become more complex, and as development teams become more heterogeneous and widely dispersed, development managers are looking beyond individual point solutions, preferring instead broader systems that extend beyond bug tracking, feature requests and other issues.
But while those managers express their desire for more functionality and tighter integration with other project-support systems, they still are keeping one eye on the budget and are leery about adding more complexity into their development server room. This creates challenges and opportunities for defect-tracking-system vendors, as well as those who offer synergistic code management, version control, requirements management and other collaboration software. That's because the ability to address these myriad problems in a single, cost-effective tool that can be used collaboratively by multiple business units still is lacking, according to several enterprise development managers.
Part of the problem is budget, as these full solutions-such as IBM's Rational Suite and Merant's Dimensions PVCS-can be expensive in terms of price and training time, according to Sean Sides, technical configuration manager for the information systems group at Denver-based health-care insurer Great-West Healthcare. "There isn't a disconnect" between what developers need and what vendors are offering in terms of functionality, he said. "The reality in organizations is a budget issue."
Sides said Great-West was running numerous independent projects with the defects being logged through spreadsheets, which he said was very manually intensive and did not offer the company a means to easily trace defects throughout the organization and deal with repeat offenders in a uniform way, such as by creating policies. "We've been doing this 12 years, and we definitely see the trend toward larger packages" that encompass more than mere defect tracking, he said. With those solutions, Sides added, "there aren't pieces to connect via automation or scripting."
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