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HOME >> SPECIAL REPORTS

Defect Tracking Lacks Appeal But its importance is at a premium

By Geoff Koch

August 1, 2007 — (Page 1 of 7)
Defect tracking may be among the least glamorous aspects of software development. The whole endeavor evokes the image of a stuffy schoolmarm scolding students for their sloppy handwriting, careless mistakes on their homework and stubborn refusal to follow classroom rules.

No doubt some of those kids who decades ago bristled at rote approaches to learning grew up to be proponents of things like Extreme Programming, agile processes and open source. In the technology environment they’re helping to create today—one that increasingly celebrates good-enough, process-light and pretense-free ways of delivering code—defect tracking can seem old-fashioned and, well, maybe even a bit irrelevant.

However, software professionals contacted at several leading providers of defect-tracking-related tools and services brushed aside suggestions that their importance may be flagging. On the contrary, many said that increasing industry complexity is putting a premium on processes of all sorts, including logging and prioritizing issues.

Among the themes that emerged from interviews conducted via a shared Google document that takes up 13 pages and includes more than 7,000 words of responses and riffs on the subject: Defect tracking is less about listing bugs than fostering communication among everyone, from developers to salespeople to customers; defect-tracking tools are indispensable to efforts to reproduce bugs and perform regression testing; and such tools should always be flexible enough to adapt to the developers using them, not the other way around.

Axosoft CEO Hamid Shojaee echoed the views of several of his industry peers that a move to adopt lightweight and flexible coding processes is among the key trends in software development. All processes, including defect tracking, are related to overhead, and it’s controversy-free to agree on the importance of reducing overhead.

“There’s a catch, however,” said Shojaee, founder of the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based provider of bug-tracking and project-management applications. “Every team—depending on the number of individuals working in that team, the complexity of the applications they are developing and the impact of a software failure, such as a Space Shuttle crash if a software failure occurs—has a different ideal point for the amount of process that would make that team most productive.”

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