Using Microsoft Dyanamics CRM as bug tracking software?

Question

I'm working at a development shop that is using outdated bug tracking software. They're currently weighing in on alternatives to replace it.

This software tracks our bugs, as well as tasks for new feature requests.

We build a core application that we configure and support for a variety of clients. In this vein, we do have customer service techs to provide assistance with both core application bugs, and bugs with the client configuration.

Because of this slant towards customer service/technical support, the proposed alternative is Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I have no experience with it, but from what I can tell, it's meant more for client-facing issue tracking than it is for bug tracking and QA from a development standpoint.

Has anyone used Microsoft Dynamics CRM and found that this would be suitable software for bug tracking?

I'm having trouble recognizing benefits of using CRM software to track bugs/tasks. I could understand it for the sales side of things, but I'd think that having separate software for bug tracking makes more sense than bundling everything together. Has anyone else run into this kind of predicament - what was the outcome, and/or persuasive arguments for or against such an approach?

EDIT: Customers don't need to add bugs directly; they call our support desk and we open a ticket. Our current software was extended to do both issue tracking and bug/feature tracking as an all-in-one system. Unfortunately, it doesn't do a great job of it - the break occurs at a source control level. We cannot associate changesets to a bug or task.

What I ended up proposing is using TFS for development tasks/bugs, which provides us with automatic changeset linking, and continue to look down the avenue of using Microsoft Dynamics CRM for customer issues. There may be ways to configure the two to work together, but if not, then a bug would need a comment added with an issue # to correlate the issue to a bug that goes through development/QA/deployment.

Thanks for the answers!

Answer 1

I wouldn't. A CRM (whilst some of them have task tracking and even software bug tracking built is) is not, (generally), developer or product centric, but customer centric.

I would suggest you look at something like JIRA for bug/improvement/dev work tracking. Depending on the size of your team you can get started for US$10.

In terms of customer facing support, if you need to allow customers to directly create issues, JIRA might get a bit expensive. If so you could consider GetSatisfation which allows you to provide front end support and includes integration with JIRA for your internal tracking/dev work.

Using get satisfaction (or an equivalent) can also help you crowd source your product's support process, potentially reducing your on-costs.

Answer 2

CRM is very customizable, and can do pretty much whatever you want it to do. We use it a ton internally... our development items are created, bugs are tracked against those, client cases are opened there, and we track those against bugs and items as well. We've got some initial work done on linking up our source control to it as well, so we can pinpoint the commits that a particular item involved.

You'll certainly need to customize it to get it to work the way you want... that may involve as little as adding some entities and fields, or as involved as writing custom ASPX pages, plugins, and workflows. I'd say if you're looking to leverage other Dynamics CRM functionality in the future, it's worth a look. If you're looking for a bug tracking system to just buy and start using, it may not be for you.