Bug Maintenance System

Question

I spent a lot of time recently reading about debugging. One of the aspects that was continually referenced was not just a bug-tracking system, but a bug-solving process. I read about people writing down takes on the problem(that did or didn't work), tests that would determine if a given take on the fix would work or not, etc.

So I am thinking, "hey, this is a good idea"

I use Mantis right now, and it doesn't seem to have that capability(without abusing its fields). Mantis works great as a bug logger. But I'm looking for something more sophisticated in interface, I think.

Example

Suppose my bug was "Pants fall off". Then I want to log this information as...

"Pants fall off; Feb 32, 2009, 25:61; when I walked into a room, my pants fell off!"

Developer 1...

Hypothesis 1: Pants too big.

Test 1:Put on a belt.

Possible Solution 1: Buy a belt.

Result = ?? Result ???

Test 2: Put on your kid sister's pants.

Possible Solution 2: Steal into her room and take all her pants while she's at school!

Result = ??, date/time = ???

Developer 2...

Hypothesis 2: Your pants have holes in them.

Test 1: Shine a light on them.

Possibile Solution: Buy new pants.

Result = ???, date/time = ???

---

Now, this is a silly example. But I think it would be great to have as a software tool. Does such exist, and if so, what's it called?

Answer 1

Trust me: you really don't want to maintain your bugs, that's why you don't find "Bug Maintenance Systems" :-)

Sorry... couldn't resist. Regarding the actual content of your question: I personally just keep track of all that information in the comment history of the ticket. Mostly I use trac for its simplicity, but also the capability to link into sources if required (at least on the file level, I wish it would grok code so you can point into the AST).

Answer 2

You could use Testopia, which is an extension of Bugzilla. This, of course, would also mean you would need to use Bugzilla.

Taken from the Testopia website:

Testopia is a test case management extension for Bugzilla. It is designed to be a generic tool for tracking test cases, allowing for testing organizations to integrate bug reporting with their test case run results. Though it is designed with software testing in mind, it can be used to track testing on virtually anything in the engineering process.

Answer 3

We also use Mantis, and like Peter Becker describes, we use the comments to describe the work on a bug. This usually works, because most bugs don't have such a long history.

If work on a bug becomes so complex it needs its own meetings and meeting notes, we usually create a task in our main work planning system and do the discussion there (linking from Mantis). That at least works for us.

At any rate, I'd be wary of a system that tries to explicitly support a certain workflow, as these also tend to lock you into the workflow they expect. An in bughunting, the workflow can vary a lot from bug to bug...

Finally, note that Mantis also lets you edit your comments. So you can change old comments to avoid cluttering the bug report.