Windows Developer Power Tools

14.0 Introduction

Bugs stink. They’re distracting because they keep us from the fun work we really want to do, they’re irritating because they make customers and management upset, and they’re embarrassing because too often they lead back to silly mistakes that we as professional developers should never have made. Unfortunately, bugs are also an unavoidable part of life as a software developer.

Change is an unavoidable part of a software developer’s life, too. Users and customers find already-implemented features they’d like altered, or they come up with new features they’d like to see wrapped into the systems you’re building. That’s all fine and good—after all, the customers are the ones indirectly paying your salary, so keeping them happy is a Good Thing.

But how do you go about keeping track of all these bugs, issues, and requests? You can only hang so many Post It Notes™ from your monitor, and Post Its are horrible when you’re trying to keep track of some sort of conversation flow on an issue. (Plus, they’re lousy for capturing screenshots.)

Unless you’re working on a miniscule project with a practically nonexistent customer base, you’ll need some sort of issue-tracking system to help keep all this information straight. Why? To help add value to your lifecycle by making sure you’re able to understand the impacts of defects in and changes to your system.

Tracking lets you keep a history of what bugs were found in which versions and when they were resolved, and of which versions rolled ...