Until recently, my .Net project had been using a bug tracking system that was, to put it politely, loosely structured. It was basically just an Excel spreadsheet with columns containing the bug description, the coder it was assigned to and the status. Testers would e-mail their bug reports to the coder, and the coder would (in theory) enter the bug into the spreadsheet, then later update the spreadsheet when the bug was fixed.
Clearly, there was plenty of room for improvement. What I needed was a system that
a) allowed screenshots to be included with the bug report,
b) allowed testers to enter the bugs directly, and
c) allowed me to generate reports of open bugs and bug fixes in each new release.
The problem was my time and cost budget available for implementing a better system: both zero.
On a quiet day just before the holidays, I decided to browse through some sites looking (make that desperately searching) for a system that fit our needs and our budget. I was delighted to find several open source bug tracking systems with a large user base and a rich assortment of features, and only one of them ended in “zilla”.
As I contemplated the feasibility of learning MySQL or PHP in an afternoon, I realized that there was another requirement that was important to me:
d) based on a development environment that I knew and loved: .Net
This narrowed the field considerably, and the option which caught my eye was Bugtracker.NET.
BugTracker.NET is an ASP.Net-based system that uses SQL Server as its database. All you need to get it up and running is IIS and a SQL Server database (the Express Edition is fine). And all you need to know to configure and customize it is a little C# and SQL.
I found it dead simple to setup, and our testers have taken to it with virtually no training. It allows screenshots to be attached, and displayed in the browser page inline. It has a very intuitive interface for generating lists of bugs based on pretty much any criteria, and the list can then be exported to Excel for further refinement. Adding custom fields to the bug entry form can be done without any coding, and customizing the form to remove unused fields is just a matter of editing as .aspx file.
It has one other feature that I didn’t think I needed, but would now hate to go without. Point it to an SMTP server, and it can generate e-mails to notify coders and testers that a bug has been assigned to them.
Bugtracker.NET turned out to be one of the simplest development tools to install and use that I’ve ever come across. Just plug it in and it works. That’s a goal that all of us developers should aim for.
