Bugzilla is one example of a class of programs called "Defect Tracking Systems", - or, more commonly, "Bug-Tracking Systems". Defect Tracking Systems allow individual or - groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product effectively. - Bugzilla was originally written by Terry Weissman in a programming language called - "TCL", to replace a crappy - bug-tracking database used internally for Netscape Communications. Terry later ported - Bugzilla to - Perl from TCL, and in Perl it remains to this day. - Most commercial defect-tracking software vendors at the - time charged enormous licensing fees, and Bugzilla quickly became a favorite of the - open-source crowd (with its genesis in the open-source browser project, Mozilla). It - is now the de-facto standard defect-tracking system against which all others are - measured. -
Bugzilla has matured immensely, and now boasts many advanced features. These include: -
integrated, product-based granular security schema -
inter-bug dependencies and dependency graphing -
advanced reporting capabilities -
a robust, stable RDBMS back-end -
extensive configurability -
a very well-understood and well-thought-out natural bug resolution protocol -
email, XML, and HTTP APIs -
available integration with automated software configuration management systems, including - Perforce and CVS. -
too many more features to list -
Despite its current robustness and popularity, however, Bugzilla - faces some near-term challenges, such as reliance on a single database, a lack of - abstraction of the user interface and program logic, verbose email bug - notifications, a powerful but daunting query interface, little reporting configurability, - problems with extremely large queries, some unsupportable bug resolution options, - no internationalization, and dependence on some nonstandard libraries. -
Some recent headway has been made on the query front, however. If you are using the latest - version of Bugzilla, you should see a "simple search" form on the default front page of - your Bugzilla install. Type in two or three search terms and you should pull up some - relevant information. This is also available as "queryhelp.cgi". -
Despite these small problems, Bugzilla is very hard to beat. It is under very - active development to address the current issues, and a long-awaited overhaul in the form - of Bugzilla 3.0 is expected sometime later this year. -