Programming Tools: Bugtracking

My final set of requests for a development environment involve the bug tracking system.

The initial observation that I wish to make is that bugs relate to a particular version of code. And that bugs stay with code until they are fixed. This means that bugs are related to the version control system. For any branch of the code, you should find exactly which set of bugs it has, and which bugs remain open. Closing bugs tends to relate to a particular point in a version control system: either "This is the fix for the code" or "This is the point where I verified that the bug no longer exists". When you split a branch, you take the bugs from that point in time - and when you merge a branch back into the main tree - or pick up the changes from one branch into another, you should pick up the changes to the bug database too.

In an ideal system, when you check out a branch onto a local machine, you should also be able to check out a copy of the bug tracking system... which you can make changes to - changes which will be applied when you merge back later. This allows you a full dev environment when away from the corporate network.

Bugs are also related to tests. Tests should be able to generate bugs... these bugs are probably along the lines of "Test xyz fails", providing links to an overnight test failure. Bugs should also be able to say "This test will identify this bug" so that you can get the test system to help verify when a bug has gone.

Bugs form trees (or rather directed acyclic networks), in a similar way to a version control system. For example the test system might generate the bug "Test xyz fails". I might take this bug and want to split it into two bugs "On windows test xzy fails because of foo" "On Linux test xyz fails because of something else". If I were to then notice that I already have a bug about windows failures due to foo, I should be able to merge that bug with it.

Bug entry needs to be easy. Really easy. When a test fails, I need to be able to add a few notes to it and WHAM! thats the bug added. Bugs are a place to store knowledge, and to allow me to find things that are outstanding.

Bugs also need to be integrated with email. I need to be able to send people questions, directly relating to the bug (so that the question, and the response, are stored in the bug). Bugs really are a chat system. This is not a bad thing.

Finally, Bug tracking and todo lists are tightly integrated. So much so, that most developers I know use bug tracking as their todo list. So when I send another developer a question - that needs to show up in their todo list - as an uncompleted part of a bug. And users need to be able to add their own private bugs, and import their emails into bugs to let them keep track of their own tasks.

I've talked about bug tracking for non-IT businesses elsewhere. And this bug tracker needs to support all of that.