Older blog entries for cm (starting at number 1)

Thanks to input from Linda Rising and Brad Appleton, I've worked up a set of patterns for defect tracking, which I think tie in somewhat with robocoder's work in SQA, so I'm putting a summary here.

First, some roles defined:

Customer

The Customer role is the person who files the bug report. It may be a real end user customer, or it may be a QA Tester, or an IT project team member-- In all cases, the duties are the same.

Programmer

The Programmer is the role taken by the person who is assigned to fix and regression test to make sure the fix didn't break other features in the system.

Tester

The role of Tester is to verify the fix and validate it against the bug reported.

Dispatcher

The Dispatcher has the role of setting priorities and assigning bugs to be worked on, then following up on work. The Dispatcher can coordinate the life cycle events between various other roles. The Dispatcher can be a Systems Analyst, Developer, etc.

Now the patterns:

• TrackingTool
• AutomatedTodoList
• DocumentWork
• CoordinateEfforts
• DifferentiatePriorityAndSeverity
• BugLifeCycle
• FixedIsNotClosed
• IncidentsAndFaults
• ReviewsBeforeBigChanges
• CaptureBugsWithTests

Later I will post more diary entries about each of the patterns individually.

The more I look at it and learn about it, the more I believe my ideal software engineering environment would look a lot like the Mozilla Project. They have a community with multiple modes of communication (web, newsgroups, email, chat). Bugzilla is an excellent defect tracking system that doubles as another form of communication among developers and between developers and QA engineers. A well-done accessible and web-viewable CVS source code repository (either lxr or bonsai are good interfaces) complements the usual source code tools. Perhaps most importantly, the tinderbox, which continously builds Mozilla on Mac, including both OSX and 9.x Windows, and Linux. For all three platforms there is a clean build and an incremental build, plus there's the ports tinderbox which adds another dozen not-quite-supported builds on a variety of common and uncommon platforms.

But best of all is how Bugzilla, Tinderbox, Bonsai and the communications media all work together. On the Tinderbox, every checkin is logged against the build where the change appeared, and the who and what of the change is a link away to Bonsai. In the change entries, bug numbers link back to the entry in Bugzilla, comments in Bugzilla entries can include attachments of patches, screenshots, stackdumps, or any other supporting documents. The irc chat system has a bot which knows about Bugzilla bug numbers and the tinderbox status even!

TheMozillaProject MozillaTinderbox