What is the difference between a "bug" and an "incident" in your organization?
Edit ~ I noticed a few bug-tracking software have the options to create an "bug" report and an "incident" report.
+3
A:
an incident is a bug report by the customer where I come from...
Ali Shafai
2009-05-18 23:20:07
+3
A:
A bug is what the normal internal QA should catch.
Incident is when you risk losing money from a bug found and reported by a customer :-).
Toader Mihai Claudiu
2009-05-18 23:21:13
+1
A:
To me, a bug is a problem with the software, for example it crashes if you perform a series of specific steps. An incident is when the server room in which the server that hosts your application is located, is flooded with water because a water pipe under the main road fractured. (This really happened to us because the bosses decided IT wasn't important and put the servers in the basement...)
TimothyP
2009-05-18 23:25:12
+4
A:
A bug is any flaw in the software that prevents the program from behaving as intended.
An incident is defined from the point of view of the service the software supports. It is any event which is not part of the standard operation of the service.
ITIL Incident Management: http://www.itlibrary.org/index.php?page=Incident_Management
keeper
2009-05-18 23:25:56
+2
A:
An incident is a generic term for an event or something that someone thinks "isn't right". Actually my company calls them "issues" to start with. A bug is one possible cause of an issue or incident.
If you've got an incident, it may be due to several possible causes. For example, a software bug, a misreading of customer requirements, a mis-stating of customer requirements. Or it may even be "working as intended" and the person posting the report didn't realise for whatever reason. That is decided according to further investigation of the issue.
Craig McQueen
2009-05-18 23:27:16
+1
A:
In my organization, bugs are logged by developers and testers, and incidents are reported by users.
Incidents are often caused by bugs, but not always. Sometimes it's operator error, a network problem, or a third-party interference.
Robert S.
2009-05-18 23:29:34
+2
A:
An incident can be a manifestation of a bug, but, more generally speaking, it's an event in time when something has gone wrong (or when someone thinks that something has gone wrong).
So I partly agree with Don.
I expect that term "Incident" in issue tracking software is really pulled from ITIL, as mentioned by keeper above.
sereda
2009-05-19 13:05:25
+1
A:
Some organisations don't make any difference. They name all that stuff with a generic "Technical Fact".
Others don't even distinguish between bug report and feature request.
mouviciel
2009-05-19 13:09:24