The Typical Use Case of an Issue Tracker

robiulroky

Joel of Fog Creek Software famously wrote about 12 steps to better software, and one of those was an issue or bug tracker. He is right. It’s hard to remember all the various different feature requests and bugs in your head. It’s even harder to remember all the steps to reproducing bugs, what the user expected and what they actually got.

There’s only so many post-it notes you can on your desk, as well. WordPress itself uses Country Email List Trac as its issue tracker. I’ve worked with Redmine, another open-source issue tracker and project management tool, because I’m at Planio, which offers hosted Redmine and git hosting.

So, imagine you’re building a new plugin for WordPress. You’ve got a small team on the job – a developer or two, a designer and a business guy.



You’re no longer a team of just one person. You don’t all work in one location, because, well, remote work is awesome, and the northern hemisphere is not so much fun in the winter.

A user sends in an email saying that the plugin “doesn’t work”. If you’re truly lucky, you’ll get a screenshot showing an error message of “doesn’t work”.

You forward the email around. Someone emails back with a question of what browser they were using, and all of a sudden you have a Gmail thread of 12 emails. There’s a few problems wrapped up here, and issue trackers help you solve these problems.