Issue Tracking Systems

5.3Conclusion

Release 1.0 was primary about creating Atlassian Connector Commons library, JIRA Connector library and JIRA UI as headstone of Atlassian Connector Module. Work on other UI packages are in progress. Recent projects state can be checked can be seen on projects home site.
Homepage: http://kenai.com/projects/anc

Recent source code: https://kenai.com/svn/anc~subversion/trunk/

Issues tracking: http://kenai.com/jira/browse/ANC

6Conclusion

Request management is an important part of every software project and using issue tracking systems is necessary, which brings us following benefits:

• 
  improvement the quality of software;
  
• 
  increase of the satisfaction of users and customer;
  
• 
  ensuring requests accountability;
  
• 
  improvement communication in the team and also to the customers;
  
• 
  increase of productivity of the team; and
  
• 
  the reduction of expenses.
  

However, even the best issue tracking system does not help if it does not have a proper request workflow and the responsible team does not learn to report requests correctly. There is enough to keep four basic rules:

1. 
   Be specific. A detailed description should state what the awaited result is and what is occurring instead – what one may consider to be a mistake.
   

2. 
   Show as much as possible. If the program writes an error message, it must be copied into the report. Adding screenshots to bug reports as much as possible is very important.
   

3. 
   Describe how to reproduce the problem. A programmer will need to reproduce the problem on his or her own computer. After writing down how to do it, the user should go through these instructions him or herself. The environment in which the problem appeared must be described –computers configuration, operating system, network connection, browser, version of Java… Anything possibly associated with an error should be recorded. A good rule of thumb is to write more rather than less.
   

4. 
   Clearly differentiate between facts and assumptions. Sometimes the bug is hidden elsewhere and with assumptions could lead the programmer to a false track. The focus should be on the symptoms and diagnosis should be left to the experts.
   

Which issue tracking system to use depends on the kind of a project being worked on, and on available resources (especially financial resources); however, from the author`s point of view, Atlassian JIRA is the best available product on the market at the moment - not only because of its possibilities of customization, extension, and collaboration, but also due to its distribution politics, which try to make JIRA available for everybody.

Due to this, the author has developed, in collaboration with Atlassian, a connector for their product for NetBeans IDE. The connector works, is available on the Atlassian website for download, and its development will continue.

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