4 Great Bug Reporting Tools For Your Development Pipeline

There are plenty of bug tracking solutions on the market. Let’s take a closer look at some great contenders.

Your company depends on software. There’s no way around it in this modern era of agile businesses and 24/7 delivery pipelines. Those apps and services you depend on might be developed in-house or you might even hire a third-party to take care of the engineering of software.

But no matter how you go about getting software developed for your company, there are tasks you must take on that you wouldn’t otherwise (as in, if you were using proprietary software purchased from a vendor). Some of those tasks include QA outsourcing (which you can also hire from onshore, nearshore, or offshore software QA services), reporting, and bug tracking.

It is that latter task that eludes so many companies. Why? Because they don’t employ the right tools. Instead of using a platform geared specifically for bug tracking, they’ll attempt to do so with spreadsheets or databases.

That’s a failed exercise from the jump.

In order to successfully employ bug tracking within your company, you need to use the right tools. As you might have guessed, there are plenty of bug tracking solutions on the market. Let’s take a look at some of the possibilities, so you can determine if one might be the perfect fit for your business.

What is bug tracking?

Before we get into the list of tools, let’s first define our objective — bug tracking. Simply put, bug tracking is the process of logging and monitoring bugs or errors located in software testing. During this process, your software engineers and testers will not only search for and discover bugs, they’ll enter them into a system to track those issues as they are addressed. Adding to this mix is the ability to assign bugs to specific developers (or groups) and be alerted when a bug moves from one status to the next.

Bug tracking makes it exponentially easier for your developers to not only know what issues have been found, but to keep track of the progress of their team, automatically report back what’s happening with issues, and know when an issue has been fixed (and even how it was fixed).

With that said, let’s find out what solutions are available. First, we’ll look at two offered as services, then we’ll examine two platforms you can install within your data center.

#1 Zoho BugTracker

Zoho BugTracker is a free issue tracking service that is part of the fairly massive amount of tools offered by Zoho. Zoho has been around for quite some time and they know how to deliver user-friendly solutions that can help your company succeed, and their BugTracker goes a long way to prove that.

The Zoho BugTracker not only offers the features you need, it scales with you as your company continues to grow. The feature list includes:

• Automated notification triggering
• Third-party integration
• Service Level Agreement automation
• Customized statuses, fields, and workflows
• Related bugs linking
• Email template customization
• Collaboration tools (such as discussions and forums).
• Invoicing, expense, and timesheets
• File storage and sharing
• User administration and access roles
• User-friendly bug dashboard
• GitHub and BigBucket integration

There are three pricing tiers for Zoho BugTracker:

• Free Plan — 1 project and 3 users
• Standard Plan — $2.50/user/month — 10 projects and starts from 6 users and goes up to 10 users.
• Premium Plan — $3.00/user/month — Unlimited projects and users.

For a complete list of features, check out the Zoho BugTracker price matrix.

#2 JIRA

JIRA is a bug tracking tool used by thousands of software professionals. This solution is built for every member of your development team, which makes it an integral component of the planning, tracking, and release of your software. With JIRA you can use an out-of-the-box workflow or create your own to perfectly match how your software development team works.

The JIRA feature list includes everything you’ll need to successfully track and manage bugs associated with your software. Features include:

• User stories and issues
• Sprint planning
• Distributed tasks
• Prioritization and discussion
• Real-time visual data
• Integrates with Confluence, Bitbucket, and other third-party services
• Knowledge management
• CI/CD pipeline monitoring
• Product roadmap
• Automation

There are four different JIRA plans, which are:

• Free — up to 10 users and 1 site
• Standard — $7/user/month — unlimited users and 1 site with advanced permissions and project roles
• Premium — $14/user/month — unlimited users and 1 site with global and multi-project automation
• Enterprise — contact for pricing and features.

Check the JIRA pricing matrix for more information.

#3 Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a bug tracking tool created by Mozilla, which has been around for quite some time. This is one of the solutions that can be installed in your datacenter. Bugzilla is open-source, free, and is used by the likes of Mozilla, Apache Project, and Red Hat.

Features of Bugzilla include:

• Automated email notification
• Reports and Charts
• Patch views
• Bug listing can be prepared in various formats
• Scheduled reports (daily, monthly, and weekly)
• Automated detection of duplicate bugs
• Bug priorities by customer
• Resolution prediction
• Optimized database for performance and scaling
• Hardened security
• Advanced query tool
• Editable user profiles
• Permissions system

Bugzilla can be installed for free on any platform that supports Perl (Linux, macOS, and Windows).

#4 Mantis Bug Tracker

Mantis Bug Tracker is another solution that can easily be installed in your data center. And with an added bonus of a mobile application, this tool is incredibly user-friendly. In fact, once you get it up and running, Mantis might be the easiest bug tracker you’ll use.

The Mantis Bug Tracker feature list includes:

• Email notifications for teams and clients
• Reports and graphs
• Source control integration
• Custom field support
• Time tracking
• Multiple projects
• Issue, change, and roadmap watching
• Unlimited users, issues, and projects
• Access control
• Customizable

If you don’t want to host Mantis Bug Tracking in your data center, you can always purchase hosting on MantisHub. There are four plans for hosting:

• Gold — $22.95/month
• Platinum — $45.95/month
• Volume Licensing — check their cost calculator for pricing
• Enterprise — contact for pricing

Check out the MantisHub cost matrix for more information on features.

Conclusion

Although there are plenty more bug tracking solutions available, one of these four can easily meet and exceed your needs. You owe it to your developer teams to employ a bug tracking system, to help make the daunting task of solving issues with your company software a bit easier.