Bug Tracking

As projects grow development starts to get messy, especially when there's more than one person working on it. It may be obvious, but sometimes a bug is just forgotten because at the time you were told about it, you were centered on something completely different. Or maybe you're working on some code somebody else did, and find something strange you don't really understand, or you do understand but think you can code better. Well, sometimes you might fuck up something you didn't realize it was directly related to that piece of code. What to say, shit happens.

While Death Raiders is somehow a small project (as the team, heh), it's not bug-free. More and more lines of code are written everyday, and sometimes there are unforeseen circumstances that happen during a game, and might just break your scripts. Usually is minor stuff, but if coded in a really bad day, it could as well mean that the whole server crashes when, I don't know, the game tries to move a character to a non-existent coordinate, or a player tries to attack an out-of-bounds tile writing the Javascript by himself. It's not always easy to cover every single error a script can have.

Until now, we've been using just some kind of internal forums, where the Alpha testers are enforced to post all the problems they face. Moving towards the new interface, however, means that players are less prone to give their feedback. Why? Because now they need to re-log to access the old interface. Of course, people can just tell you on your instant messenger "hey, this is wrong, fix it", but it's not as effective as leaving a simple error report in a forum.

That's why today, I've been struggling with Mantis and Bugzilla, two of the most famous bug tracking tools, both of them freeware, and web based. While I'm more familiarized with Mantis (as I've used it before), I've finally decided to install Bugzilla. I'm still trying to finish the set up, tho.

These tools are just that, bug trackers, with options to set a different relevance for the problems or suggestions, their status, the version of the software they belong to, who's working with them, if they are resolved or not, and extra files attaching. Quite cool, when you get it to work as you want. Plus, the interface is really straightforward, at least for the reporters. 

If everything goes right, maybe I'll be able to show some stats in a couple of months. If not, well... no stats :P