Choose Defect Reporting System For Your Project

Defect reporting and tracking system is a compulsory means of any software development project. Defects (or bugs) occur constantly during the team’s work. That is because all people make mistakes. You cannot do anything about that. All you can do is to find these mistakes and fix them. Defects are actually errors in the initial code. The final product may work improperly because of them. That is why all errors should be found at the stage of testing. Different software development projects include different models of testing. However, usually it is conducted at the final stage of work. The product can be tested either by the users or by the team. Defect reporting is the main stage in software testing. It is conducted after all defects are found.

The defect reporting process is extremely important if you want to improve the quality of your final product. It is actually a kind of defect documentation. The main task for the developers at the stage of defect reporting is to create defect reports.

Defect report is a document that includes all data on a certain defect. Usually it must contain the name or ID of a person who found the defect in the process of testing, the time when the defect was found, the type of defect, and the way it affects the functionality of the product. Defect reports may be subdivided in two large groups. The first group includes defect reports made by the users in the process of user testing. Of course they are less detailed, because the user is not a professional developer, and so he cannot describe defects properly. Usually user reports contain only the most general information about the bugs. After the team receives them, it has to check their data by testing the product repeatedly. The second type of defect reports includes only reports that were made by the team members after testing their product or its certain part. They are usually more detailed than the user reports. Their great specification allows the developers to choose the best way to fix the defect. Defect reports created by the team contain not only information on the type of the bug and time of its occurrence, but also the data on the possible ways of its correction.

As we can see, defect report is the main document in software testing. All work related to bug correction is based on it. It means that it is extremely important to write defect reports correctly. However, it is not a simple task if you have no defect reporting system.

Modern software development industry has lots of defect reporting tools. They were invented to simplify the work of the developers. To find out how they work it is necessary to give the definition for a defect reporting system.

Actually, defect reporting systems are applications that were created to write defect reports automatically. Before their invention the developers had to make special tables and write all information on the detected bugs in them. This process consumed lots of time. Hence, the time for defect correction was wasted.

With defect reporting systems you have no need to create tables and fill them yourself. The application will do it automatically. All you need to do is to start using it. Defect reporting systems are usually combined with defect tracking systems. Bug or defect tracking is a more general definition that involves not only defect reporting, but also detecting them and creating lists. Modern defect tracking systems became popular project management tools. They are indispensable in the process of product testing. If you need to test a product or its part, you should not do it yourself anymore. The application will conduct the process of testing successfully and report on all bugs. All you have to do after that is to fix them and conduct the testing procedure repeatedly to see if there are still bugs in the final product.

Most modern defect reporting and tracking systems are quite simple in use. You should not spend lots of time to teach the members of your team to work with them. The interface of these applications is quite intuitive. It means that any developer can learn working with them without wasting any time.

The selection of defect reporting systems in the modern software market is extremely large. You can choose anyone according to your needs and budget of your project.