What is an issue- or bug tracker?
An issue tracker (also known as bug tracker) is a piece of software or a web application that helps a team of people organise problems and deal with these problems in a work flow.
The IssueTrackerProduct is basically a replacement from using emails to communicate things that needs to be done. The issues in question are quite simply items that need some sort of improvement either by the person raising it or by someone else who is more equipped to solve it. Communication often happens between one group of people on one side and another group of people on another side such as a client and a consultant or a provider and the public. Someone discovers that something needs to be arranged or fixed and instead of sending a email to a particular person or a group of people you submit the issue on an issue tracker without worrying about who exactly will deal with it. Once the issue is submitted, any person with access to the issue tracker feeling equipped to solve it can chose to deal with this deals with it. This person uses the issue tracker as well to note the actions taken such as "Take issue", "Reject issue" or "Complete issue". The whole time all actions are logged and persistently stored so that you can track what has happened, what hasn't happened and what will have to happen.
A bug tracker is virtually the same as an issue tracker except that the word "bug tracker" is often used instead of "issue tracker" when the tracker is used for software development teams because software has bugs. As opposed to general communication which doesn't have bugs; it has issues. (Another common connotation is "ticket tracker" or "ticket tracking" which means the same thing as bug tracker or issue tracker)
An issue tracker can either be used set up in different ways:
- closed - When only people with authentication access and add or read existing issues
- public - Anybody can access it but but without authentication access some actions are restricted
- closed but some public access - Closed but allows public to add issues via some external service such as email
When you phone up a support service, you can raise issues you have but you can't see your issue(s) side by side with other issues. Their call centre software is built to allow public access in but no centralized content allowed out. This is often accomplished with an issue tracker by enabling an inbound email account. (see this How To about how to combine a nice web form with the inbound email functionality) That way, you allow people to send emails in to one email address and the issues raised in the email gets added to the issue tracker system and whoever has authentication access to the issue tracker can deal with that email and the correspondence of that submitter without revealing all your other issues raised.
Read more about the IssueTrackerProduct, what it can do or what it looks like.
