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. + At the time Bugzilla was originally written, as a port from Netscape Communications' + "Bugsplat!" program to Perl from TCL, there were very few competitors in the market + for bug-tracking software. Most commercial defect-tracking software vendors at the + time charged enormous licensing fees. Bugzilla quickly became a favorite of the + open-source crowd (with its genesis in the open-source browser project, Mozilla) and + 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 +
integration with several automated software configuration management systems +
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. +
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. +