notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

Using wiki for bug-tracking

AS BUSINESS ANALYST, I’ve been involved in a small project in Bratislava, Slovakia. Now that I wear the tester’s cap, I am having the dubious pleasure of seeing my design materialized on the screen. And I am helping developers to debug the thing.

The 4-person team is using a wiki to track issues, and I quite like the casual feeling. We could use a “fully dressed” solution like Bugzilla. And if the team were bigger, we’d have to.

The joys of using “undressed” or “partially dressed” processes & tools are sadly underrated. Companies love to grow and adopt “mature” frameworks to prove they are growing responsibly. That’s why we have RUP and CMM(I) (and why lots of techies wear suits). But sometimes the solution that barely does the job is a whole lot better than one that offers a myriad of options and forces you to follow a process.

The wiki just does what we need: I manually add an issue into a list and a developer will color it green once he’s done with it. Simple to the point it doesn’t feel like work. It’s more like an impromtu conversation. And the job gets done fast!

I’ll recommend this to any small software team: travel lightly, and you’ll get there sooner and with fewer pains encountered on the way. (Damn, have I just discovered Agile?)

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PS This is my first post that is related to what I do for a living. Perhaps I should re-think my tagline unless I do more of this. And the title, too, since there hasn’t been much of the classical CRM here. I love the way this blog defines itself regardless of my will.

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March 27, 2007 | Filed Under Software delivery 

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