Defect Tracking Goodness: God I love FogBugz

Today was a turning point for me as it relates to defect tracking and feature request management with customers.

I finally got off my butt and completely integrated FogBugz into our development and QA process, including the ability to take in direct email from customers. The result? You can now email a single account (even with attachments such as screenshots, logs etc) and the email gets placed in a triage area on the defect tracking system as a new case. Once reviewed by staff, it gets moved directly into the build process. All emails that exchange between the customer and the support staff are automatically tracked in the case management; there is no extra software or process to set up.

Next step will be to integrate the checkin of Subversion (our source control system) to work closely with FogBugz to track when fixes occur, and produce useful diff stats to show code coverage and areas that may need another look in the test plan.

Another neat (but secret) feature??? The new additions let me do an online crash analysis in the same manner anonymously, by using FogBugz BugzScout to track duplicate incidents submitted on the fly. Once I figure out how to dynamically route a stack trace as its crashing... it can fire off an alert right then and there and allow us to statistically find common bugs as they occur. Of course, the kind of stuff we are finding right now isn't at all crashes; they are functional or usability issues that unit tests should be catching better. But thats another story.

Anyways, I have now just finished removing BugZilla, the defect tracking system I have been using since the inception of the company (hell I used it at th last company when Mozilla was still just beginning). It's now removed off the dev server and has been replaced with FogBugz. If you haven't given it a try, consider doing so. Don't let the silly name fool ya. It's a well written and professional Defect/Bug and Incident System that is worth time investigating.