Defect tracking is the most important aspect of software testing as defects are an important source of quality metrics. Defect tracking helps the QA team to ensure the quality of the software. It is therefore the responsibility of any tester to file as many defects as possible, so as to guarantee the quality of the software product.

Now, bug tracking is not as easy as it sounds. Just filing of defects won’t serve the purpose. Instead these defects or bugs need to be managed, evaluated and prioritized. The defects filed by the testers need to be quickly fixed by the developers, so that the testers can verify it and close it out. So defect tracking is very crucial to both the testing and the developing team. In normal cases, the defects are filed in a database. This makes it all the more difficult for the developers to retrieve the bugs so as to fix them. If an effective defect tracking management is in place, these bugs can be managed easily.

Advanced test management systems have a built in defect tracking system. The most important aspects of these systems are that the bugs filed are displayed on the project dashboards and since it supports live tracking, defect charts are updated the moment a bug is filed. This helps the testers to get info like the location of the bugs, the backlogs, and their priorities fast and within no time.

Tags: defect tracking, bug tracking, bugs, software testing, defect tracking management, test management system