Original Post
I''m working in a small company (it''s rapidly growing) as a programmer. We''re using Visual Studio and Sourcesafe for version control.
However, we haven''t found a good way to handle bugs, or rather how to report bugs and follow them up. A bug tracking system (or incident management as some like to call it) which fits into our system.
We would like both developers and betatesters to use it. That means that people who is not within the development environment (Visual Studio) should be able to report a bug into the system.
How have you other guys solved this (working in teams) so that both developers and other people (within the company) may report bugs.
Developing a web-application may be an idea, but if there''s already a good working system for this, that would be even nicer.
The problems we''re experiencing now is that, for example, some bugs are sent via mail (from the guy in the room next to the developer room), sometimes someone comes in and tell someone in the development team about something they "feel" is a bug and it gets noted in a file or on paper. And so on... it''s very easy to any reported bugs get''s lost, it''s hard to follow them up, and so on.
Thanks in advance for any comments.
) program which is basically just a form with several standard boxes to fill in. One could be the general type of issue (eg. graphics, networking, logic, plot/story, etc) so that there is a higher chance that it will go to the right person first. Then a big text box for a good description of the issue. Another consideration might be a choice of 3 ''priority'' settings, the top one being a ''showstopper'' bug that needs fixing now, and the bottom one being something that doesn''t actually need fixing for the game to work, but it would be nice if it was. There would also be a box to enter the bug-reporter''s name, or it would be auto-generated once the tool is installed. When done, the reporter presses submit. What you do with it then is up to you: you could saved it out in CSV format and mail it to some central source, having 1 person responsible for entering it into the database. Or you could write a little extra into the app and have it add it to a database over the network, so that anyone can browse it. I''m sure you could extend this system to suit your specific needs.
And you could probably get something efficient done in less than a day... it is surely more convenient than paper, and if you need a hard copy it would be easy to print out the output file, I''m sure.