Any issue in design, coding, specifications or features that cause incorrect results is called a bug. Bug tracking is one of the important aspects of a software development lifecycle to deliver quality products.

Having a robust defect management process improves the overall quality & compliance posture of your organization and generated confidence amongst your clientele.

It also helps you to stay ahead of your competition, book higher profits & develop a highly motivated and quality oriented workforce.

Before we select the right tool, let’s see the major benefits that a bug tracking tool provides:

1. Deliver High-Quality Product

A bug tracking software helps to track all the issues, bugs of the product and make sure that all the detected bugs are fixed.

Having a single source of truth is very important while running large projects. There are multiple moving parts and seamless integration coupled with agile methodology is critical to the product delivery.

Having the right bug tracking tool helps with in-depth bug analysis, provides visibility to the overall direction of the project & enables proactive implementation of corrective measures in a timely manner. All of which are crucial in delivering a high-quality product on time and within budget.

2.Improve Return on Investment (ROI) by Reducing the Cost of Development

A bug tracking software helps with bug prioritization and assignment based on severity and importance. This helps the development team to focus on high priority bugs first instead of low priority ones.  Thus with major hurdles out of the way earlier in a development cycle augurs well for your development team and the overall success of the product.

As a result of bug tracking, identifying trends becomes easier & leads to quicker root cause identification and resolution. Your bug tracker is also a knowledge powerhouse for future references leading to fewer iterations & reduced development efforts.

This eliminates unwanted delays in your project delivery, leads to a significant rise in team productivity and reduces the overall cost of development. A win-win for you and your customers.

3.Better Communication, Teamwork and Connectivity

With task collaboration, in-app chat, and email notifications, a bug tracking tool keeps everyone on the same page. You can assign the right resources to test or fix bugs on time.

Ease of access and use allows for greater collaboration among teams. Real-time access, review, update & bug reports eliminate communication gaps, improves transparency & accountability.

Teams are forthcoming in brainstorming & troubleshooting issues rather than wasting time on finger-pointing and shying away from responsibility.

Most importantly, everyone is aware of the progress, aligned with the overall project plan & work towards the common goal.

Want to check out what OrangeScrum offers, explore more here.

4.Detect Issues Earlier and Understand Defect Trends

The biggest benefit of using a bug tracking tool is that it allows companies to track all the bugs at one centralized location – who reported the bug, who fixed them, what the priority is and how long it took to fix.

Using a tool helps to analyze the bug trends and it can be referred in future by the development team to enhance the product prevent recurring issues.

Insightful reports around defect trends, defect age, open and closed bug trends help inadequate resource planning and budgeting too. You can account for these aspects while bidding for new projects & set the right stakeholder expectations for consistent customer satisfaction.

5.Better Service and Customer Satisfaction

A bug tracking tool allows collaborating among your QA & Dev teams, managers & customers. They can directly login to the system to report a bug. Most of the tools are designed in such a way that a user can easily create bugs with all the required information needed for a developer.

The QA team, developer, managers or customer will get status updates of the reported issues via instant email notifications or inside the tool in a single view.

Besides that, the stakeholders can provide further clarification, suggestion, feedback if any on their reported issues. So it enhances the service you provide and clarity for the development.

A direct involvement of customers through bug tracking software in testing phase results in happy and satisfied customers. They will be happy to see less or no bugs to use their product efficiently which is more reliable, trustworthy and even may recommend it to others.

Conclusion

A bug tracking software is relevant to find, fix and track bugs to reduce the cost of development and deliver a high-quality product to customers. It further saves time and enhances the team’s productivity.

Smart companies the world over manage their resources and bugs in a better way instead of managing over emails or spreadsheets that put your project, resources and company’s reputation in jeopardy.

Bug tracking can be used in each and every stage of the development process, thus helping developers to be content, be highly productive & offer solutions faster.

Rigorous Bug tracking processes safeguard the interests of the parties involved, increase conformance to the project scope & prevent scope creep.

In the end, you deliver what was exactly requested, customers receive what they exactly wanted and both of these happen On-time and within budget! What a sweet spot to be in J

In the next article, we will discuss how you can manage your bugs in OrangeScrum. Meanwhile, why don’t you share your bug tracking challenges with us?

Want a bug free product, take a look here.

Open source software has proven to have many benefits for enterprises as well as developers, however, they also pose significant risks as they are prone to a number of open source vulnerabilities. These are particularly related to application security.

A number of developer teams rely largely on open source software to quicken the delivery of digital innovation. Traditional, as well as agile development processes and workflows, often make use of per-built and reusable open source software components.

However, the problem lies in the fact that most open source software is often not subject to the same level of checks as compared to software that is custom built. Most of the development work is crowd-sourced to a large community of developers who often have little understanding of the security concerns that may arise based on the organization’s use of the software.

Use Relevant Tools to Find Vulnerabilities in OSS

Listed below are some of the popular tools and their USPs that might help you manage vulnerability in open source software.

Node Security Project (NSP)

The NSP is known largely for its work on tracking security of Node modules and NPM dependencies. The project offers tools that scan and finds vulnerabilities using some public vulnerability databases like NIST National Vulnerability Database as well as its own, inbuilt database. The project was recently acquired by npm and integrated into the latest version of npm in the form of npm audit. It is a script to check whether any public vulnerability has been found in your packages and node modules.

npm audit automatically checks for issues in your  for direct dependencies, bundle dependencies and development dependencies. When you install a new package or update an existing one, it shows a brief summary of the issues found in your local dependencies. You can also use the tool to generate security reports for JavaScript projects.

OSSIndex

OSSIndex is a repository of software information that focuses on vulnerability issues. It extracts its information from NPM, Nuget, Maven Central Repository, Bower, Chocolatey, and MSI.  Along with its own database that leverages the NIST NVD, it also pulls vulnerability information from mailing lists and various other sources.

OSSIndex effectively covers JavaScript, .NET/C#, and Java ecosystems. It offers a REST API endpoint so that developer can build an inhouse application to check for vulnerability issues.

Dependency-check

Dependency-check is an open source command line tool from OWASP. It can be used as a stand-alone tool or as part of a package of inbuilt tools. Dependency-check supports Java, .NET, JavaScript as well as Ruby. It pulls its vulnerability information from the NIST NVD. Lots of plugins to  to several IDEs, deployment systems, and source repositories are built on top of dependency-check.

Bundler-audit

Bundler-audit is an open source command line tools that checks for dependencies focused on Ruby Bundler. It retrieves its vulnerability information from the NIST NVD and RubySec, a Ruby vulnerability database.

Commercial Tools

Apart from open-source tools, there are commercial tools like: Hakiri, Snyk, WhiteSource, Gemnasium etc. Most of these tools provide dependency checks for a projects based on a wide-array of languages via static code analysis. Apart from that, they also offers free plans for publicly accessible open source projects and paid plans for private projects. In addition to offering tools to identify known vulnerabilities, commercial tools also assists developers to fix these issues with guided upgrades and open source patches.

Notify the developer community about the vulnerability

In case you come across a vulnerability in the open source software, it is a good practice to inform the software developer of the vulnerability in the package. If the software has an active developer community, this often results in a prompt response and a quick fix. In case the software package in question is not being actively developed at the time, you are left with one of the three following options

1. Patch the library yourself so that all users benefit from the update
2. Identify a similar alternate package that can be used
3. Build a replacement package in-house according to your organization’s needs.

Patching the library and giving it back to the community is probably the best option of the three.  Anyone using the library will benefit from it and you can expect more community members to join in. Apart from that, being popular in the open-source circles will help your company build reputation which is always a good thing.

Integrate Security Compliance Practices into Your Application

Automating some of the tasks and integrating additional layers of security can prevent you from having vulnerable dependencies in the first place. Let’s have a look at the best practices to integrate security compliance practices.

1. Make Security a Company-wide Culture – Security policy should span across departments and usually involves close collaboration with the organization’s IT R&D department.
2. Focus on Compliance – Year round compliance goes a long way in mitigating security risks and helps organizations avoid costly fines later. Compliance represents a set of tools and best practices for keeping your application secure and free from possible attacks. Creating a set of policies that support action and automation for constant compliance helps avoid regrettable data breaches and other security vulnerabilities.
3. Automation – Automation may well be the only sure way to execute security policies. Some examples of policy components that can be automated include-
   • Policy-based Integration
   • Integrity Monitoring
   • Threat Intelligence
   • Compliance Assessment

Address Internal Threats – Written policy is something that is good to have in place and supports an IT culture of better security, it is important to complement this with employee training and awareness. Encouraging an atmosphere of ‘see something, say something’ is a helpful way of ensuring each employee in an organization plays a part in ensuring security and compliance.

Write Tests for Your Components and Dependencies

Probably the most comprehensive way of improving the security of the open source software your organization uses is to test the security of each open source code. Open source analysis is almost as important as proprietary code, because not only could the code have unknown security vulnerabilities, its dependencies and functions may differ between each use case. Therefore, a component that may be secure in one application may be insecure when used in a different application.

Build gate checks, constraints and validations for your components and dependencies so that some of the milder vulnerabilities in your dependencies won’t have an impact on your application. Security testing and code review are the only sure ways to detect these issues.

Prioritize Threat Intelligence

Risks cannot be effectively addressed without keeping an eye out for accurate knowledge of your environment and threats. With access to comprehensive threat intelligence, an organization can understand and respond to negative challenges before a possible data breach because of a vulnerability. For instance, ensure that your organisation has taken measures to keep track of security updates for both direct and indirect dependencies in a timely manner. In addition to that, keep note of modern threats and whether any of those threats are capable of having an impact.

About OrangeScrum:

OrangeScrum is an Enterprise Open Source Project Management & Collaboration tool that helps you to organize your tasks, projects, resources, docs, invoices, expenses & timesheets at one place. It offers both Open Source and Cloud version. To know more details, visit orangescrum.org.

You can use OrangeScrum to manage and track your bug & issues at one place.  Read here how you can use OrangeScrum as a Bug Tracking System or you can check out the Bug & Issue Tracker feature of OrangeScrum here. Download our free Open Source Project Management Tool to manage your projects, bugs, tasks, users to maximize your productivity. Want a personalized demo, schedule a demo here.

From developer to CEOs to customers, everyone hates bugs in their code/software/product. A product manager will always want to make it zero while delivering the product to customers.

But still customers find their product buggy! There could be many reasons.

May be there is a requirements gap or a communication gap between QA team(s) & developers, or maybe they are using traditional methods to communicate & track bugs.

In 2002, a study commissioned by the US Department of Commerce‘s National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that “software bugs, or errors, are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the US economy an estimated $59 billion annually, or about 0.6 percent of the gross domestic product” (Wikipedia)

Every company/team has its own process of tracking bugs; but what we actually need is an interactive, real-time collaborative tracking tool to monitor your bugs & deliver great product(s).

“Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!” Edsger Dijkstra

Every time a company outgrows itself they look out for a new process or a new tool. And we all know what this entails; yet the cycle goes on…

It is crucial that the Quality Assurance process be highly granular, informative and a quick solution enabler. Common practices today are repetitive, tedious, time-consuming and often fail to provide a time-bound collaborative approach.

What we would like is a controlled yet quick and easy workflow that keeps our processes intact while making it a very inter-active and transparent affair.

Let’s see how a typical bug tracking workflow would begin, progress and end with utmost collaboration and quick resolution.

A solution (tool) I envision should help –

Capture Bugs & Defects

Once you find a bug/defect in a product, create a project & tasks under the project with the bug details, descriptions, attach screenshots & define estimated hours to fix the bug. It may be a functional bug or a responsive issue.

“Finding and fixing bugs, or “debugging”, has always been a major part of computer programming” Maurice Wilkes

Define and customize Bug Life-cycle

Orangescrum lets you to create your own custom workflows based on task statuses and their lifecycle. You can easily classify bug types, assignment flows based on your organization’s predefined QA process or create one if needed.

Bug Management: Assign & Prioritize

Upon logging a bug, you can assign, accord priority, organize these tasks within Task Groups (bug types) to group similar bugs for ease of reference and resolution.

You can assign each bug task to the concerned developer to fix it immediately with a due date.

Auto-notifications ensure that updates to bug tasks such as assignments, status changes, comments are instantly delivered to the intended recipients.

Time tracking for bugs

During your task creation, you can estimate hours required to resolve it. The QA/developer can use the timer to track the time. You can also set resolution due dates for robust planning and execution.

Defects to Fixes

Upon development fixes, the product team can assign it back to the QA team for retesting & mark a successful logical closure of your defect. All comments, documents from bug reporting to closure are captured chronologically for absolute transparency and efficiency.

Measure success

Orangescrum offers interactive Gantt Chart, Kanban Board, Resource utilization, project overviews enabling accurate performance measurement and robust execution.

You can easily track

• Insights to individual QA/Developer performance
• Estimated vs. Actual hours spent on bug fixing
• Quick access to TO-DO lists, In-progress and in –pipeline tasks
• Well – defined milestones-tasks-resource mapping

I want this solution to be seamless and close knit with an inbuilt automated notification system, comment history, activity details, and status progress all under one single view.

Takeaways

• Get complete view of your bugs & developer and QA team activities with total transparency.
• Time and effort saving from multiple email exchanges, reminders and follow-ups.
• Reduces red-tape and administrative overheads.
• Improves the resource efficiency of the business and reduces the bug fixing cycle.
• Online or On-premise solution depending on the size of any company for quick and easy access anytime, any device, anywhere.

Do you want to realize above benefits? Explore Orangescrum with Task Status Group.

Conclusion

Industry agnostic Orangescrum is suitable for multiple scenarios ranging from being a Bug Tracking Tool, an Application Tracking System, Marketing and Sales Campaign management to being your own Personal Assistant to help with your daily chores.

Let me know how you are/would like to use Orangescrum. Put your creative hat on and spread your charm.

Important Massage to our Open-source, Enterprise & Add-on Users
We discontinued the Add-on Selling from Nov 1, 2021 and the Add-on Support will be discontinued from Feb, 2022. Any user want to use our On-Premise Solution are recommended to migrate into Orangescrum Self-Hosted plan.

New Year Bonanza! Host Orangescrum – The Awesome Cloud version all by yourself!

Collaborate to infinite User groups, Task Managers & mobilize your workforce….

Now, you can host Orangescrum cloud version on your own server. You can create unlimited users, projects, task groups etc. This version works for you who want to keep their project management data in-house and away from public view. This also works great for enterprise customers.

We will help you to install Orangescrum at your premises, and you’ll have full control over your entire data. You just need to share your hosting details and our team would take it from there. If you don’t have one, no worries, we can suggest you the options to choose the best one.

At Orangescrum, we respect Data-Privacy.

We assist you to take complete control and implement total security of your project helping your team in making your On-Premises-Installation and Deployment easy, making sure your data is deployed to Orangescrum properly without any issue or data breach.

Using Orangescrum Enterprise Edition at your premises; empowers you to take complete control over your project data while managing it efficiently with collaborators. Enjoy the ease of tweaking Orangescrum code as best suits you.

Our support team is just a call away to make sure that you’re getting the best out of Orangescrum. Orangescrum’s on-premises solution provides the control and validations that many regulated businesses require with a 24*7 team support to ensure hassle-free project management.

What you get; Bonuses Unlimited

1. Get benefited with all the features in Enterprise version as that in Cloud. You get all the extended features that is available in the Cloud version of Orangescrum. Along with that get highly beneficial add-ons adding muscles to your copy of Orangescrum yet simplifying your project management needs.

2. No restrictions with On-premises deployment: With Orangescrum as the Fort-Knox, you can create unlimited projects; invite unlimited users, unlimited storage & much more!!!

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and write to us now!

See the list of complete features of orangescrum open source project management software

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