The Complete Guide to Issue Tracking Best Practices

Issues are a common occurrence during the product life cycle—they’re inevitable. These errors may occur either in the product’s source code or even in the system on which the application has been built. Organizations need to be able to keep track of all the issues and bugs reported along the product life cycle to be able to provide customers with a delightful experience. Needless to say, issue tracking is a crucial function of the software development team.

An effective issue tracking system helps to find these defects and resolve them promptly in order to ensure that a quality product is released to customers. It is the single source of truth for all issues and bugs that have been raised during the course of software development.

Benefits of Issue Tracking System

Every product business should have an established process for capturing, categorizing, and resolving bugs throughout their entire product development process. The main benefit of the bug tracking system is that it provides a centralized view of all your product issues to make it easier to track and manage them.

Detect Issues Early

Early bug detection and proactive issues resolution can save you a lot of time, energy, and resources. It also helps to reduce the overall complexity of bug resolution since defects discovered at later stages might wreak havoc on the system affecting both the product and the business.

Reduce Development Costs

Handling issue tracking without the right tools can be a cumbersome process. An issue tracking system simplifies defect tracking and resolution quite significantly. This reduces the operational costs and effort needed to resolve these issues at a later point.

Resolve Issues Quickly

The issue tracking system has a lot of moving parts. The steps needed to resolve various issues require a great deal of team collaboration, tasks delegation, and follow-up. A comprehensive bug tracking issue simplifies the process and helps reduce time required to resolve issues.

Build Delightful Product Experiences

Customers do not appreciate buggy products since they have a direct link with how their business runs. With bugs proactively identified and resolved on time, users are bound to enjoy using your product because it always performs as it should and improves the performance of their teams.

Improve Retention and Satisfaction

In today’s competitive market landscape, releasing a high-quality product is vital if you want to retain your users and stay ahead of the competition. The key to earning customer loyalty is to ensure that bugs are resolved as quickly as possible.

Improve Issue Tracking With These Best Practices

Focus on the Right Goals

Your issue tracking process should focus on the specific goals of your organization. As a thumb rule, you should map your goals to KPIs and use your tool to measure them. For example, the time taken to resolve each bug is usually mapped to the SLA. You can improve SLA response and resolution times by using your issue tracking tool to record metrics and make changes that help you achieve your goals.

Small Incremental Improvements over Large Steps

The issue tracking process is more of a marathon than a sprint. Thus, it is better to focus on small incremental steps rather than giant steps. It takes time for your bug tracking framework to become routine for your team. Before getting things to that point, the focus should be on gradually perfecting your process rather than trying to go all the way from the get-go. Focus on developing a tracking framework that works and improving it gradually rather than making big changes all at once.

Measure Efficiency Along the Way

The core of developing an effective bug tracking framework is to ensure that your process is continually improving. For this to be possible, you have to consistently evaluate how you do things and measure outcomes accordingly. Tracking results along the way will ensure that you are on the right track. It also makes it possible to identify bottlenecks in the process that you can address to improve performance and overall efficiency.

Take Steps that are Focused on Customer Expectations

Your bug tracking process should follow a customer-centric approach. Every issue, task, and process within the issue tracking workflow should be tied to your customers’ needs. There will always be differing opinions within your team, making it difficult to prioritize issues. Everything your team works on as part of your issue tracking process must improve the user experience of your product. When you make the voice of your customers your focus, you will find it easier to prioritize issues.

Track Outcomes, Not Tasks

Many companies focus on solutions that track and monitor tasks rather than the outcome of these tasks. Issue management must always be focused on efficiency. At the end of the day, the goal is not merely to identify defects and assign them but to see to their resolution and enable a smooth customer experience. All your issue tracking efforts must be aligned towards this outcome.

Conclusion

The above points are but a few best practices that help you improve your issue tracking efforts. If you’re looking for a solution that helps you track issues and bugs, reduce resolution times, and improve process efficiency, you should give Kissflow Workflow a try.

Kissflow Workflow is a comprehensive issue tracking system that helps you create customizable workflows for a flexible approach to issue tracking. The platform comes with the internet’s most powerful form builder to help you collect crucial information and an advanced analytics module to help you make consistent improvements.

What are you waiting for? Try Kissflow Workflow for free.