Bug Tracking Tools

Hunting down, fixing, and tracking bugs in web apps and website might be every developer and engineer’s least favorite part of their job. Unfortunately, wrangling bugs is becoming more and more of how they spend the majority of their time. Frameworks and tools for building web apps and websites have gotten more and more powerful. While these resources make building and maintaining complex web solutions easier, they bring with them more and more bugs. In addition, the number of device to operating system to browser combinations are in the tens of thousands. Simply put, it's becoming impossible to keep track of bugs. 

While all bugs are important, at LogRocket, we focus on bugs that affect the front-end; issues which occur client-side. While there are plenty of solutions to track bugs in server-side code, front-end bugs are notoriously hard to track down and reproduce because they live in the wild. 

There are many other reasons to track bugs, but here are some that our customers typically cite:

• Understand how bugs affect users: By tracking bugs in a central repository over time, you can see patterns in how those bugs affect certain types of users. For instance, you might see a bug and assume it affects everyone, but it may only affect users with Firefox. It would be difficult to make that assumption if you were only looking at one individual occurrence of a bug, rather than many. 
• Reproduction of bugs: Similar to understanding how they affect users, tracking bugs helps reproduce them. Tracking bugs can help your web engineers identify similarities in the user’s environments so they can best reproduce that environment. This removes the need to reach out to the user to ask them what browser or device they are using. 
• Confidently triage and determine the severity of bugs: tracking bugs over time helps your team understand which bugs are critical, and which bugs can be assigned as lower-impact. That way, your developers can focus on what matters most. For example, you might be able to identify that if a significant amount of bugs occur in a checkout process it will lead to less revenue. 
• Ensure bugs are fixed: After identifying a bug comes time to fix it. When a developer reproduces then pushes a fix for a bug, ensuring that it was actually fixed needs to go beyond verifying the fix was successful in one environment. By tracking bugs your team can confidently validate that a fix was successful. For example, if a bug was occuring for 40% of users then a supposed fix was pushed and now 15% of users still experience the bug, the fix was not fully successful. 
• Judge effectiveness of development team: related to ensuring that bugs are fixed, tracking bugs helps you determine the quality of code that engineers are shipping. If certain developers, features, or functionality tend to have relatively few or no bugs, developers can be commended for their work. 

So how can you track bugs? There are dozens of strategies for building your own solution, but tools like LogRocket provide a central repository of errors along with the context of the errors to determine how they affected users. Get a free trial today.