No software development company can do without good bug tracking software. The bug tracking software automates the work of the whole development team and helps to fix all the bugs in the product, until the product is stable and can be launched to the market. To perform this work, a team needs perfect order in the QA, bug fixing and development sectors.
First bug tracking systems appeared about 10 years ago and nowadays we can use multiple of them. Some of them are free and open source, like Redmine. Others are available for free only partly, but you need to pay for an extended version. Most of them are sold as SaaS or on-premise solutions. I could quote examples of Zoho, Jira, FogBugs, Comindware.
The solutions mentioned above are already available on the market except one, it is Comindware. Any bug tracking system needs a database where it stores all the information about the item states and other operations as well as all the functional data that is needed for the workflow. It’s relational databases in all of the solution except the new-born Comindware where the guys made an absolute new core for their solution. This is a rather uncommon case to create own database for a simple tracking system but it has sense. The database used in Comindware is semantic. A semantic data base means that all the approach to the data structure becomes much more flexible than it is in the solutions based on traditional relational database. What does this give to the end user? It’s as simple as a pie yet no one has offered it into the market yet: the possibility to change processes on the run, without programming, in a graphical workflow builder with drag and drop.
What does this give to the end user? Most of software development teams work is built upon agile methods. Those methods are flexible and make it possible to perform all the development operations more quickly and adapt the main strategy to the changing working process conditions. Changes in the working process mean that the bug tracker has to reflect it. With most of bug tracking solutions this is quite a problem. You have few options: delete the existing process and build a new one, or clone the existing process, bring changes to it, delete the existing process and start the clone. Usually programming skills are required to perform this. A semantic technology enables the user to change the process while it is being executed. As soon as you have drag and dropped a new element to the process, the process starts to run through the new workflow. The only disadvantage the new system has, it hasn’t appeared yet. The Comindware Software Development solution will be available on market by the end of 2011 only.
