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Tracking down bugs is a tiresome but critical responsibility for any software team. However, adopting a purpose-built bug tracking tool can save tremendous time and headaches compared to makeshift solutions.
In this comprehensive hands-on review, we’ll explore using Backlog to optimize the entire life cycle of finding, prioritizing, assigning, reproducing, and fixing those pesky software defects.
By the end, you’ll understand exactly how Backlog can help you and your team deliver higher quality code on time. Let’s get started!
Why Teams Need Better Bug Tracking
First, it’s important to level-set on why patching together various spreadsheets, documents, emails, and chats for bug tracking eventually breaks down:
1. Details are scattered and siloed – Reconstructing a bug’s full timeline across multiple sources is enormously inefficient.
2. No single source of truth – With bugs captured disparately, everyone may have slightly different data leading to confusion.
3. Critical data is “sticky notes and napkins” – Undocumented bug capturing breeds critical details living briefly in people‘s heads or easily lost scraps of paper.
4. No transparency for the team – When bugs go straight to an engineer’s inbox, no one else knows to prioritize helping.
5. No traceability to code changes – Associating bug fixes with precise code commits after the fact is virtuously impossible.
In my experience consulting Fortune 500 tech teams, most accept these types of headaches as the norm. However, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Backlog to the Rescue
Backlog provides an integrated platform covering software project management, collaboration, planning, and monitoring. And one particularly killer feature is streamlined bug and issue tracking.
But Backlog is not simply a one-dimensional bug tracker. It weaves robust bug capture and correction workflows into the broader product development lifecycle. Let‘s explore why this matters…
1. Standardized Issue Tracking
Every problem gets documented in Backlog as a universal “issue” entity. This could represent a bug, task, feature request, etc.
Standardization avoids the multiplicity of bug data spread across various documents and tools.
2. Centralization
Backlog acts as the hub for all software project planning, status visibility, and work execution. Integrated components include wikis, repository integrations, boards, timelines, notifications, permissions, and much more.
Centralization means bugs tie directly to all other development activity from a single dashboard.
3. Transparency
Every team member sees all bugs, tasks, and requests in Backlog. You get complete visibility into what’s currently being worked on and what’s coming up next.
Transparency reduces communication gaps so you can proactively uncover blockers and align on priorities.
Simply put, Backlog removes all friction from contextualizing, discussing, and resolving software bugs by combining issue tracking functionality with complete project insight.
Walkthrough: Bug Management Workflows in Backlog
Now that you understand Backlog‘s unique value proposition for bug management, let‘s walk step-by-step through common bug tracking scenarios:
Step 0: Search Avoid Duplicates
Averting duplicate bug reports starts with first searching existing issues before logging anything new.
Backlog makes this easy by letting you filter across:
✅ Keywords
✅ Status
✅ Category
✅ Assignee
✅ Date range
✅ And more…
Step 1: Log New Bugs Completely
Upon confirming a unique bug, open a Backlog issue filling out details like:
- Descriptive title
- Full written details
- Steps to reproduce
- Screenshots
- Severity
- Affected components, versions etc.
Robust upfront documentation by the finder ensures no critical details are lost.
Pro Tip: Save templates of common issue types like bugs and tasks to speed up this process.
Step 2: Prioritize Against Other Work
Armed with full bug visibility, managers examine severity, milestones, and team workload to determine priority level.
Integrated scheduling views act as an additional input for deciding when best to tackle issues:
Pro Tip: Custom tagging and filtering allows grouping bugs across projects for easier cross-project prioritization.
Step 3: Assign to Engineer(s)
Once prioritized, bugs get assigned to engineers based on expertise, workload capacity, and priority trigging notifications.
Granular access controls ensure engineers only see issues intended for them, reducing distraction.
Step 4: Investigate and Reproduce
Starting investigation, engineers leverage details from the initial report to reproduce the bug on their environments.
Inline comments facilitate asking clarifying questions from the finder and peers for missing steps without changing contexts.
Step 5: Root Cause Analysis and Fix Plan
Leveraging full project context from linked repository commits, build logs, tests etc., the engineer diagnoses the underlying bug trigger.
Comment discussions support peer review of tentative fix plans before major development investment.
Step 6: Fix in Branch
The engineer progresses towards resolution committing fixes in a private feature branch.
Backlog automatically associates commits with the linked issue for end-to-end traceability:
Step 7: Review and Merge Fix
Post fix, engineers create a pull request for peers to review the code. Approval discuss happens inline before merging to mainline.
Step 8: Regression Test
After merging the completed fix, the engineer and quality team rigorously retest the affected areas to prevent regressions.
Step 9: Close Bug Issue
Finally, once properly verified as solved, developers update the issue status to closed signaling resolution.
Pro Tip: Use custom conditional workflows to require proper bug verification gates like peer signoff before allowing closure.
As you can see, Backlog codifies industry best practice bug resolution patterns into an intuitive platform. Standardization along with deep development and testing toolchain integration drives efficient bug investigation and removal.
Key Benefits and Capabilities
Now that we’ve explored common start-to-finish bug management scenarios, let’s spotlight some of Backlog’s standout strengths:
Avoid Bug Report Chaos
No more piecing together scraps of data on bugs from various emails, chats, verbal conversations, etc. Backlog makes every detail easy to find without having to track down that one engineer who has critical clues hiding on a sticky note somewhere.
73% of teams using Backlog report significant time savings tracking bugs more easily.
Custom Workflows
Backlog allows custom issue type definitions with conditional workflows. For example, force bugs to route through more rigorous QA validation gates before closure compared to lower risk enhancements.
Support teams heavily leverage robust workflow functionality to enforce compliance processes around security, access, and change control policies.
Audit Trails
Full activity streams and notification feeds capture every bug-related change with timestamps and ownership details.
Understand exactly when each update occurred and by whom for complete accountability.
Code Integration
Native integrations with Git and SVN repositories tightly couple bug fixes with underlying code changes.
See exactly which commits, tests, and reviews involved which engineeers to enable actual root cause analysis.
Dashboards and Reporting
Real-time dashboard charts and reports provide macro statistics on trending bug types, aging issues, ownership bottlenecks and more.
Leverage datadriven insights to continually refine processes around bug prevention, detection, and remediation.
Backlog Plan and Pricing Options
Backlog currently offers both forever-free and paid plan options:
Free Plan
- Up to 5 team members
- 10 GB overall storage
Paid Plans
- Unlimited users and projects
- 100 GB storage per organization
Pricing starts at ~$25/month for up to 10 users. Full pricing details here.
For larger organizations, enterprise quote-based plans are also available with additional customizations around security, compliance, and advanced authentication integration.
Click here to start a 30 day free trial of Backlog premium features. No credit card required.
When Backlog Makes Sense
Consider Backlog if your team currently contends with any of the following bug tracking anti-patterns:
✅ Details scattered across various documents and conversations
✅ No single record of truth for bug history
✅ Critical tribal knowledge never recorded
✅ No idea what peers are currently working on
✅ Hard to tie bug fixes with specific code changes
On the other hand, specialist tools like Bugsnag or Raygun may provide more targeted value if you only want to focus on automated error and crash reporting analysis for web apps.
And complex software engineering organizations may be better served by scaled platforms like Jira Software.
Final Thoughts
Eliminating frustrating bugs is every development team‘s goal. But without disciplined tracking and coordination practices in place, many find whack-a-mole triaging issues burns tons of time while shipping low quality code.
As we‘ve explored today, Backlog provides a streamlined system to capture bugs systematically while setting engineers up for successful reproduction and resolution. Integration across the entire development lifecycle also gives critical context to why the problems happened in the first place.
The bottom line? More bugs fixed correctly in less time.
To experience Backlog‘s optimized bug tracking yourself via a free 14-day trial, click the link below and give it a spin – no credit card required:
So in summary, I hope walking through how Backlog can alleviate bug headaches provided some fresh ideas and best practices for your team to consider. Questions or feedback? Hit reply and let me know!