How To Use A Bug Tracking Software

Bug issues come and go, but great agencies always have processes in place to resolve the errors fast. To get rid of bugs without wasting time, you need an efficient bug tracking process that sets your web team up for success.

Bug issue tracking software can help. This technology is designed to help teams like yours fly through the bug tracking and reporting process. It can automate some of the most time-consuming aspects of collecting feedback. But without pairing your software usage with other efficient practices, your investment can only take you so far.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can save time while boosting accuracy when you start using a bug issue tracker like SimpleStage.

How to Use A Bug Tracking Software

1. Simplify Your Bug Tracking Workflow

Bug issue tracking software is designed to streamline your workflow. With SimpleStage, for example, collecting key information about bugs is as easy as taking a screenshot. Information about each bug is instantly saved for your agency’s developers.

But capturing bug information is only one part of a complete bug tracking process. In order to quickly find bugs to capture in the first place, you need to simplify your internal testing processes. After getting bug reports, your web team still needs solid processes for:

• Determining the severity of bugs
• Communicating the progress of a fix to clients or end users
• Recording solutions, so you can easily resolve the same bugs in the future if they occur
• Creating an audit trail for each bug, who has taken care of it, and when it was resolved

Pairing your bug issue tracker with a project management software can help you streamline your workflow with ease. Plus, it will also add transparency to and encourage collaboration within your web team. Your team members can follow up with each other on the progress of a bug, or work together to solve it.

2. Enable Client Bug Reporting

Your web team members are the experts when it comes to fixing bugs. However, that doesn’t mean your clients can’t help find them.

Clients can actually be highly valuable helping hands within the bug tracking process. They offer a different perspective. For example, if your web team is working on a staging site, you might be hyper-focused on one area at a time. Clients can provide a more holistic view by looking through an entire webpage with fresh eyes.

Clients can also let you know if something is an error in their eyes — even if there’s no actual bug in your code. Simply inviting clients to report bugs can help you get on the same page about their expectations.

Using bug issue trackers for client reporting

When using a bug issue tracking software, don’t be afraid to give your clients (and even their end users) permission to report. Looping in more relevant users helps you cover all your bases when hunting for website bugs.

A tool like SimpleStage allows you to do so with ease. Your clients, end users, and non-technical team members can assist with bug tracking sending detailed reports. They don’t need any prior experience. SimpleStage knows that most users outside of your web team won’t know the nitty gritty details about the bugs they find — or even their own screen size. Our bug issue tracker will record this information on their behalf.

With clients involved, you can feasibly catch and eliminate 100% of errors ahead of your website launch day. Or, you can confidently keep a live site well-maintained. Since poor UX on mobile alone can make a sale 62% less likely to happen, these are both feats worth celebrating.

3. Pair Bug Reports With Visuals

Bug issue trackers like SimpleStage already capture the data that your web team needs about reported bugs, such as screen width and device type. With SimpleStage, your users are essentially “screenshotting” the exact issue as bugs occur. You have the ability to see what they saw when they reported the issue. No need for your team to spend hours trying to recreate the exact problem as your client describes it via email.

Making bug reporting as easy as possible for clients is important. But giving them the option to submit visuals can help your web team a ton. For example, if you’re on different devices, you may not see the same issue they’re experiencing. When you can visualize what’s going on, you can better understand how to fix your code if the error isn’t obvious.

Pairing hard data with visuals can give you a well-rounded look into bugs that occur.

Resolve Errors Faster With a Bug Issue Tracker

Investing in a bug issue tracking software is a great step toward greater efficiency. When you start making your surrounding processes more efficient too, your web team can resolve errors far faster. You’ll spend less time on bug tracking and more time enhancing websites. As a result, you can become a five-star agency for each of your clients.