melbourne chapter

As projects start to grow in size you often come into management issues, clients sending members of your staff errors through email or over the phone, and often people don’t pass on the errors correctly or get all the details about the bug. Soon enough you have clients upset that their 2 second bug fixes haven’t occured and tracking them is impossible.

I needed to get onto a way of centralising the errors for the application, and immediately hunted online. Althought there are many choices, Bugzilla is widely used and available to you under Open Source. It runs using MySQL and Perl (CGI) scripts, and takes a little while to configure. I simply dropped an email to my hosting provider and they were able to install and configure everything for me and have it turned around within a day.

Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a webapplication that operates by having users log bugs under various severities to products and components of your application/project. It allows you to restrict the viewing of products from users, allow delegation between users and handles all notifications and sorting for you. It is very active in development and has a lot of support.

Now clients can post their bugs into the system directly, and all of the developers can use it to internally keep a centralised listing of bugs. Clients are notified when the bug is fixed and everyone is kept happy.

Since I have been using Eclipse I have now had the bug reporting lists integrated directly into my Eclipse Desktop using this very cool plugin:

Buglist - Eclipse/Bugzilla Plugin

Overall making the step up in this system has helped management of bugs, and make it easy to keep on top of them and provide not only better custom service, but better software and professional practices.