Defect-Tracking Tools: Price Vs. Performance

Users want more controls, more integration, but balk as complexity, costs begin to climb

By David Rubinstein

February 15, 2004 —

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."

Sides said Great-West does much of its development for Microsoft's .NET environment, yet is ramping up with a number of Java projects. "We went to .NET two years ago, and there was definitely a learning curve. The resulting code was more buggy, but I think a lot of that was due to more training being needed and not quite having a clear understanding of the platform at that time," he said.

He added that Great-West initially licensed PR-Tracker from Softwise Co. to begin managing software defects, but is planning to move to SCM Lab's Quartet, which also offers version control, release management and change management. "There's no way to assimilate change requests with version control in PR-Tracker. It's just not as robust and customizable as the big boys," he said.

Not all defect-tracking vendors want to add lots of new functionality to their tightly tuned software. For example, the keepers of the open-source Bugzilla defect tracker are trying to avoid complexity. "We don't want to bloat it or make it more complex," said David Miller of the project. "One of the main focuses is to keep it as a bug tracker," he said, despite users who have expressed an interest in being able to do project management in the tool as well.

Miller said the Bugzilla team is working on improving the modularity of the source code, rearranging it so common code is put together in a more object-oriented type of structure. "As features are requested, things get hacked into it, and that has complicated the scripts," he said, adding that there are currently 600 or 700 open feature requests for the software. "People want to be able to run it with other databases, but it runs now on MySQL," he said. "PostgreSQL is likely to make it into mainline projects," he projected. Also, he said, users are asking to have Bugzilla run more easily on Windows environments.

A COMMON DASHBOARDJacob Florentin, technical coordinator at Uniondale, N.Y.-based Open Link Financial, said users of defect-tracking and other related tools would benefit from a unified dashboard-type approach that provides all parties with information that is relevant to their jobs.

Open Link Financial builds trading systems for the financial and energy markets, Florentin said, adding that the time lines and requirements associated with creating software in those markets often don't allow for too many controls on software development, making the tracking portion all the more critical. "This is a tough act to put together," he said. "Our clients are very big with big demands, and we need to operate very fast."

Among the features Florentin would like to see rolled into a larger solution are time-sheet systems and a trigger for build tools. "A client finds a bug, it gets tracked, and then they want a new build. It would be good to automate the process to alert us when all bugs are fixed so a build for that branch of code can begin." As for time-sheet systems, Florentin said he would like to be able to quickly see what he and other members of a development team were working on a week earlier, for example, to help in the process of monitoring progress toward completing the tasks and to track the costs of the project.

Florentin said Open Link is using Tech Excel's DevTrack solution, which offers project and defect management and also can access other tools such as Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe and Perforce's source configuration management tools, and IBM's Rational ClearCase for requirements management.

The trend of bundling these tools into suites might have the effect of forcing smaller companies to forgo the tools and develop a home-grown solution for defect tracking, said Craig Hill, release engineer for Kewill Solutions NA, a U.K-based developer of supply-chain management software with North American headquarters in Marlborough, Mass.

"The bigger shrink-wrapped tools that do the start to finish are for very large corporations, and I don't know that I've ever seen anyone roll that out completely," Hill said. "The drawback on large tools is that they are complex and expensive."

Hill also was glad to note that vendors are beginning to invoke more process-driven controls into their tools. Merant's Tracker, which Kewill uses in its development, allows developers to create dependent fields that are definable, to recognize that the characteristics of one piece of data affect the characteristics of another piece of data, he said.

One tool that Hill said is not useful to his work is a static code analyzer. "I don't trust 'em," he said. "The analyzer can't determine what the intent of the developer was. You'd have to build in artificial intelligence" to make the tools more important, he said.

Yet one trend he would like to see vendors pick up on is trending-the ability to do a post-mortem after a project is completed and evaluate it against prior releases.

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