Where Are the Issue/Defect/Bug Tracking Tutorials?
I've been using Scarab lately, I've also use Bugzilla and GNATS. Each is wonderful and sucks, in its own special way. One thing that has come to mind recently is that I've never actually had any kind of training with any of them. I don't know anybody that has. The knowledge of issue tracking has come from the development culture.So, I am wondering, what is there that I do not know? What practices and techniques am I missing from simple ignorance?
Speaking with non-developers who've tried to file bugs against projects (as they are always told to do) shows that it is non-intuitive, and most just forget it out of frustration. Often there are rants in open source projects about duplicate bugs that just cause further pain to the users. A look at many sourceforge projects shows that most developers want people to file bugs. Yet they complain that people don't search to see if a condition already exists. The average neophyte (and many experienced alike) are lost at the process of dealing with a bug tracker, let alone trying to find if its already been filed.
Searching amazon find little to nothing on books that cover issue/defect/bug tracking. Searching google finds very little to nothing on tutorials, howtos, or best practices, other than trivial introductions.
We all are using a bug tracking system is important. Yet, knowledge is simply passed from user to user. Where are the tutorials? Where are the getting started guides? Where are the in depth articles for those who are beyond the submit/assign/fix basics? How can we get better at using the tools? How can we help those new to the tools?
2 Comments:
I do agree that there is a lack of information about how to properly handle defects (howtos, etc), but my observations about the community differ from yours. I use/contribute bug reports/patches primarily to ASF projects and other misc projects that use JIRA, Trac or Bugzilla; I haven't come across many that use a different bug tracking method. While I do agree that the average non-developer would probably not report the bug or report a duplicate, there is nobody in my circle of developers that do not report every bug they find. On duplicates: I see them happen from time to time, but generally they are closed and a reference to the original is cited. Good point about lack of info, though. In my opinion there is a lack of good open-source project management info in general.
If you want books, I know there's a book about FogBugz from Apress.
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