Lesson 11: Efficient Ticketing: Your Eye of Sauron

[CFL2M] Why Tracking Bugs Manually Is Dangerous

*Note: This content is from our free ColdFusion Legacy 2 Modernization E-Course [CFL2M]. Interested in getting the full course? Click here to sign up.

Tracking bugs via emails or spreadsheets is not a legitimate ticketing system. It’s not modernization; it’s an accident waiting to happen.

Last email, we cleared out deadwood—if you haven’t tackled it yet, now’s the time to revisit and prune your code. Now it’s time to keep the bugs in check.

A formal ticketing system tracks bugs so your dev team can stay organized and efficient. Do it manually and there’s a good chance:

Bugs will slip through the cracks.
Multiple developers will work on the same bug simultaneously without knowing it.
Confusion will arise about which bugs are truly fixed.
Goblins will invade your app, unite with the bugs, and all hobit children will tremble.

With a ticketing system, you get access to lots of data. You can tell how good your individual developers are and how good the team is as a whole. With important data that can help you answer the following:

What’s the average number of days it takes to get a bug fixed?

Which devs fix the most bugs?

Which bugs do devs say were fixed but when they get tested they really weren’t?

When the bugs are organized, you can prioritize them and assign the most difficult bugs to the most competent programmer. It’s a huge help when you have to decide who does what and which bugs get done first.

Lastly, it will help you avoid getting bed bugs. Otherwise, you might have to throw your mattress into Mount Doom just to get a good night's sleep! 😉

Jokes aside- if you’re currently relying on email and spreadsheets, it’s time for an upgrade.

Aragorn Action Step: Sign up for a trial of a ticketing system and play with it (some popular ones below).

If you’re using Github or Bitbucket for version control, you have a built-in ticketing system. Make use of it!

Some other popular change trackers among CFers include:

You can also use popular project management tools to track bugs, such as Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Monday, Trello, etc.

While these will help track and assign bugs as tasks to developers, and often view on a Kanban board the status of all bugs at a glance, they won’t show the developer statistics I mentioned above.

If you already have a formal ticketing ticketing system in place, then congrats. You get to rest and enjoy a nice second snooze while the others have to work 🙂

Cheers,

Michaela Light, CEO TeraTech

PS Next up in this email course, we’ll explore a hot topic - how to reduce ColdFusion maintenance costs.