How effective is your Quality Assurance department’s defect management tool? Sure, it can log and route bugs. But can it do more? Is it doing more? These are questions that should both be answered Yes! If not, that’s ok too. But take a long hard look at what effective issue management can do, and consider what other areas this often over looked ‘necessary evil’ is capable of.

At Marketnet we have utilized Redmine, an open source application developed on the Ruby On Rails framework. Out of the box it is pretty robust, allowing a plethora of defect management options:

• Project and Subproject management
• An impressive Role based management system
• Status, Priority and Issue management flexibility
• Build in News, Documents, forums and wiki sections
• Highly customizable

These are crucial elements to any defect tracking system, and Redmine delivers. We’ve setup new Roles and customized the work flows to better support our clients, insuring there is appropriate coverage for projects of all sizes and addressing the special considerations for Client Acceptance Testing.

But what about considerations for future projects with the existing client? What about the ever important concept of lessons learned? These could and should be utilized by your defect tracking system to some extent. Let’s take a look at both.

Do your projects often have a latter phase for maintenance? Do you anticipate a newer version of the recently rolled out application sometime in the future? A fully realized defect tracking system can serve as a catalyst for both. Often times when a client is engaged in User Acceptance testing (UAT), they will end up logging bugs that are outside of the scope of the project and do not meet requirements. This should be perceived as an opportunity, not as bugs!

Address each as they are generated, but at the end of the project, classify them as Change Requests and meet with the client to discuss them. You instantly have the criteria for new Use Cases and, if the client agrees, have created the basis for a latter project. All of this can be documented (and here’s the best part) and easily implemented using your defect management tool!

Now, what about Lessons Learned? The project has wrapped up and the team disassembled, moving on to other tasks. But what about Lessons Learned? Not enough time? Well make time. You can start by utilizing the defect tracking system as the basis. With Redmine, you have built in components that can easily be leveraged to facilitate a Lessons Learned task.

For each project there is a summary of Issues. You can parse out statistical data on Trackers, Priorities and Assigned to Values. You can determine how many bugs were opened on each build notice, and determine what category types. These can be summarized on the Forums feature, and the Lessons Learned can be conducted electronically!

You should now see the merits of a fully realized defect tracking system. Your developers will be won over as they see quantifiable results. Your project managers should be happy for instantly producible metrics. And the client will love and retain you as it can be clearly illustrated their best interests are defined and needs understood and managed.

Steve Hartline
@MarketNet
MarketNet