In engineering

Engineering

Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...

, defect tracking is the process of finding defects in a product (by inspection, testing

Quality control

Quality control, or QC for short, is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production. This approach places an emphasis on three aspects:...

, or recording feedback from customers), and making new versions of the product that fix the defects. Defect tracking is important in software engineering

Software engineering

Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...

 as complex software systems typically have tens or hundreds or thousands of defects: managing, evaluating and prioritizing these defects is a difficult task: defect tracking systems are computer database systems that store defects and help people to manage them.

Defect prevention

The objective of defect prevention is to identify the defects and take corrective action to ensure they are not repeated over subsequent iterative cycles. Defect prevention can be implemented by preparing an action plan to minimize or eliminate defects, generating defect metrics, defining corrective action and producing an analysis of the root causes of the defects.

Defect prevention can be accomplished by actioning the following steps:

1. Calculate defect data with periodic reviews using test logs from the execution phase: this data should be used to segregate and classify defects by root causes. This produces defect metrics highlighting the most prolific problem areas;
2. Identify improvement strategies;
3. Escalate issues to senior management or customer where necessary;
4. Draw up an action plan to address outstanding defects and improve development process.This should be reviewed regularly for effectiveness and modified should it prove to be ineffective.
5. Undertake periodic peer reviews to verify that the action plans are being adhered to;
6. Produce regular reports on defects by age. If the defect age for a particular defect is high and the severity is sufficient to cause concern, focussed action needs to be taken to resolve it.
7. Classify defects into categories such as critical defects, functional defects, and cosmetic defects.

See also

• Bug tracking
• Comparison of issue tracking systems
  Comparison of issue tracking systems
  This article is a comparison of issue tracking systems which are notable, including bug tracking systems, help desk and service desk issue tracking systems, and asset management systems...