Editing Bug tracking system (section)

== Usage ==

The main benefit of a bug-tracking system is to provide a clear centralized overview of development requests (including both bugs and improvements; the boundary is often fuzzy), and their state. The prioritized list of pending items (often called backlog) provides valuable input when defining the product road map, or maybe just "the next release".

In a corporate environment, a bug-tracking system may be used to generate reports on the productivity of programmers at fixing bugs. However, this may sometimes yield inaccurate results because different bugs may have different levels of severity and complexity. The severity of a bug may not be directly related to the complexity of fixing the bug. There may be different opinions among the managers and architects.

A ''local bug tracker (LBT)'' is usually a [[computer program]] used by a team of application support professionals (often a [[help desk]]) to keep track of issues communicated to software developers. Using an LBT allows support professionals to track bugs in their "own language" and not the "language of the developers." In addition, an LBT allows a team of support professionals to track specific information about users who have called to complain&mdash;this information may not always be needed in the actual development queue. Thus, there are two tracking systems when an LBT is in place.