What is Issue Tracking and Why Should You Perform It?

Issues with processes and products are inevitable. But, how often they occur, depends on your business.

With bugs, defects, and problems slipping through the cracks in most IT projects, it’s crucial to have an error-monitoring system to effectively manage your project. Without faults being documented and resolved, your project can quickly veer off course. 

Issue tracking is undoubtedly the single best way to ensure clients and coworkers collaborate and work together effectively. Let’s begin with a clear definition.

Issue tracking is the practice of systematically recording identified errors, so they can be fixed or resolved fast and effectively. It helps developers, testers, and other project team members to keep track of any errors that arise during the product design process.

There are various methods to track problems in software design or business processes. Some organizations use a formal issue tracking system such as JIRA or aqua cloud, while others may just create a document or spreadsheet with all the tasks documented.

Monitoring defects and fixing them is an integral part of product development. This can range from following up on feedback to correcting errors and updating the product with new features. In short, it’s a basic process that assists the product team work more effectively and efficiently.

This article answers the questions on what is issue tracking and what is issue tracker. It also looks at why you should perform it, and how it works behind the scenes.

📌 What is an issue?

An issue is a problem that needs to be solved. It represents the type of work that needs to be done. They are usually related to problems or bugs in a software app, but they can also refer to any kind of problem in business operations or processes.

Issues can be as simple as someone not being able to find your product on Amazon, or it could be something more complex like a system outage that impacts the entire company.

📌 Who is responsible for error tracking?

Error tracking highlights priority matters and helps ensure that everyone involved in the project knows what roles they have in fixing problems identified during testing. It also helps ensure that there are no missed deadlines when working on multiple tasks at once.

Generally, the best-qualified person at the task will be responsible for fixing them, although it helps if a dedicated manager is on the case.

The error tracking system lets people know what happened and why. It also gives them insight on what steps to take next so it doesn’t happen again.

The most important thing is to ensure that the monitoring system is being followed and that the complaint is being addressed by a qualified project team member.

📌 Why should you track issues?

Issues are the reason why your product doesn’t work as it should. Tracking them can help you fix them fast. With a tracking. It’s easier to see what’s faulty, and whose job it is to resolve it and get everyone working together to fix it. And if you have dozens of issues, keeping a track of them will help classify the ones that are top priority and fix them first.

Without a good tracking system, your team cannot spot what’s broken and the time it takes to fix it. Teams that struggle with issues are less effective than those that have a standard system for identifying and fixing defects quickly. Tracking issues also helps with debugging by showing where problems exist in the system so developers can focus on spotting and correcting them.

Essentially, issue tracking management helps in the following ways:

✅ Makes it easier to do a follow-up

The ability to follow up with customers and collect details about the status of a complaint is essential for effective management. It’s also the most common activity in process management and the one that can be automated through software tools.

✅ It helps you prioritize issues

Complaints that need to be fixed first can be spotted quickly, meaning it’s easier to focus on them. As long as they’re not urgent, they’ll get completed at their own pace and then the next ones will get started.

✅ It helps you track progress

Problem tracking can help you manage your workload, as you can easily see how many issues you have and when you’ll be done with them. It also helps you prioritize your work because it’s easier to focus on the most important issues if you know what they are.

✅ It improves your business processes

Being able to resolve complaints faster with a standard issues tracking system makes your business process more efficient, which will save you money in the long run.

✅ It helps you fix issues faster in the future 

It also allows you to identify patterns and correlations that might help you predict future problems and therefore provides a faster way to resolve subsequent issues

It keeps your customers happy

Complaints, questions, bugs, etc are quickly addressed and resolved, which means happier customers in the long run.

📌Conclusion

Issue tracking should be a part of any development process, big or small. Any time you have trouble keeping track of something, an effective problem-tracking system can help. This is true whether that problem is a pending client project, support tickets, ways to improve your office layout, or ideas for your next startup.

At aqua cloud, we believe all businesses thrive on flexibility and error tracking allows this to happen while keeping you out of the woods. Wherever you are in your business development process or workflow, effectively tracking issues will help you get to the next step.