Defect Management Process:

As a software tester or a QA engineer every minute you must be thinking to find a defect or a bug in an application. We are Software testers in other words defect finders. Defect/Bug/Issue/Fault/Failure/Incident whatever we can choose to call but our primary objective is finding, recording, reporting, managing and tracking these.

We can use an excel sheet for records and can track emails to report/alert/communicate but when there are multiple releases or bug fixes in a projects then the number of test cycles and the count of the people involved increases so it becomes important to have a stronger mechanism that can make the management of these issues simpler and consistent, so we can concentrate on finding more issues or bugs than managing the ones which are already found.

To enable the same there are various bug tracking systems or defect management tools. All the tools that belong to a certain genre consist of large number of common and similar features that we can bank on.

The below mentioned features are absolutely necessary for any bug tracking system:

1. Reporting facility : Reporting facility provides information about the bug, environment, severity, module, priority, screenshots etc.

2. Assigning : Assigning is used to assign the bug to the particular developer who has worked on that functionality of the application

3.Workflow : Workflow is essential as it shows the current status of the bug.

4.History/work log/comments

5. Reports : graphs or charts

6. Storage and retrieval : In a testing process every thing needs to be uniquely identifiable, the same rule is apply for bugs too. So, a bug tracking tool must provide a way to have an ID, which can be used to store, retrieve (search) and organize bug information.

List of 10 Most Popular Bug Tracking Tools/Software :

1. Bugzilla: Bugzilla the leading bug tracking tools used by many organizations.It is completely open sourced and is free to use and it is very easy to access and supports web based interface.

2. JIRA: JIRA is an incident management tool and commonly used for bug-tracking. It contains the complete set of recording, reporting, workflow and other convenience related features.It supports agile projects also. It is a Paid tool

3. Mantis: Mantis bug tracker is an open source tool which gives balance between simplicity and power. Users are able to get started in minutes and start managing their projects while collaborating with their team mates and clients effectively. Once you start using it, you will never go back!

4. Trac:Trac is an enhanced bug tracking tool for software development projects. Trac is used to manage web-based software project. The main aim of Trac is to help developers to develop great software while staying out of the way.

5. Redmine: Redmine is an open source, web-based bug tracking tool which allows users to manage multiple projects at the same point of time.It works on Ruby on Rails framework and it supports cross-platform and cross-database.

6. HP ALM/Quality Center: It is a commercial test management tool which assure to cover all the quality activities including requirements , test covrage, test management, defect tracking, as well as areas like business process testing, it is popularly known as Hp-ALM Application Life Cycle Management.

7. FogBugz: FogBugz is an commercial integrated web based bug tracking tool,it is very simple to use and allows to manage, filter, sort, create, list, assign and navigate a tree-structure of tasks and work on cases created.

8. IBM Rational ClearQuest: It is a commercial product, it is a client-server based web application which works as a defect management tool and also has an additional feature that it can provide integration with various automation tools. It works as an end-to-end, customizable defect tracking system.

9. Pivotal Tracker: It is an open source bug tracking tool which encourages an Agile process and Used by hundreds of companies for active development process.

10. Zoho bug tracker: It is an online commercial bug tracking tool which supports features like create Projects, milestone, tasks, bugs, reports, documents and so on.