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Track Bugs and Feature Requests
by Ken Cox

Enterprise Application Lifecycle Management 2003

DevTrack 5.1 is an advanced bug- and project-tracking package for software-development teams. In addition to offering traditional Windows GUI client applications, DevTrack uses Internet Information Services (IIS) to support browser-based data entry and reporting. The back end uses Access, SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, or Borland's InterBase database.

Tracking defects and feature requests takes a great deal of organizational effort, especially when team members are scattered in multiple locations. DevTrack aims to streamline the workflow and make projects manageable. A bug report is usually more than a simple text description. It might include a log file, a screenshot, a Knowledge Base article, and a customer contact. DevTrack coordinates these elements by letting you upload files and documents along with the issue, include links to fixes and workarounds, and associate the bug with files checked in to Visual SourceSafe. DevTrack also includes an NT service for automating e-mail notifications to team members. The Enterprise version offers an Internet portal where customers and partners can participate in defect tracking.

Installation of DevTrack is easy but assumes a working knowledge of databases and IIS. For example, manual intervention was necessary when the Web configuration tool failed to set the access rights correctly on the Scripts directory in IIS 6. Be sure to install and explore DevTrack's sample bug-tracking project and its accompanying tutorial. These excellent resources demonstrate the software's procedures and concepts quite clearly.

Every issue in DevTrack has a unique ID and an owner (a team member or a group) throughout its lifecycle. This ensures that problems are tracked rather than sidetracked. DevTrack supports user roles to keep members focused on their tasks: Managers can view reports on showstoppers, team leaders can distribute bugs to programmers, and developers can update their progress and forward fixes to the QA team for closing.

The GUI and Web client interfaces are intuitive and uncluttered. It's easy to enter everything you need to report about a problem, such as the description, software version, and priority. The History tab is a great way to get a quick summary of what's been happening with a bug (see Figure 1). The administration interface lets you customize almost everything about the product—including the graphical interface, mandatory fields, spell-checking, permissions, and e-mail lists—but it's fairly complicated. TechExcel should implement context-sensitive help and tooltips to assist the user.

Although it's somewhat expensive for smaller companies, DevTrack 5.1 is packed with features and options that should bring order to chaos in a software-development operation of any size.

About the Author
Ken Cox is a VB.NET developer in Toronto building e-commerce Web applications and XML Web services. Ken is a former broadcast journalist and a Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET. Reach him at .