IBM is going to acquire Rational Software for about US $2.1 Billion. Stories are all over your favorite web sites, like this Washington Post article. How will this affect the Java/OO/Web software development world? Discuss amongst yourselves.
The common context for all these defect tracking patterns is that the bug database and the defect tracking system are internal, and used by the development team members, which may include someone in a customer-facing role who takes reports via the telephone or email and enters them into the system. A general-purpose customer support problem reporting system is outside the scope of these patterns. Some aspects of defect tracking within the development process are either too low-level or irrelevant to the general user population.
The patterns frequently reference four roles that development team members may play. These named roles have specific definitions within the patterns.
Keeping these roles in mind while reading the patterns is an important aid in understanding them.
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:
Now the patterns:
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!
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