K-Bridge Defect Tracking System®
Overview  
How it works?  
Architecture  

Overview

K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® is a web based enterprise defect/issue tracking system.  Unlike hosted (often referred as ASP solutions) bug tracking systems, organization installs this system inside its firewall and leverages single installation of K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® for the entire organization or between one or more  locations.  This allows organization to  effectively and securely manage the internal defects and issues of its products/projects across different product/project teams and resources even though they are geographically located at multiple locations. 

K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® provides ability to create separate defect management workflows for one or more products and projects.  This is important for the organization with the large number of products/projects.  When the products/projects are very different, it becomes business need for the organization to manage their defects and issues in a way that is suitable for respective product/project development, testing, and verifications processes.
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How K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® works?

Following provides an overview of how the issues are managed in the K-Bridge Defect Tracking System ®:

  1. K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® provides easy to fill form over the web so that anybody in the organization can fill out and submit one or more defects or issues of a product/project.  If the system is visible outside the firewall, even partners and contract manufacturers can submit the defects or issues if they are part of the product/project teams.  Upon submission of defect/issue, a Defect is created in the system with the unique defect number.

  2. Each Defect in the K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® provides the following attributes:

  • Defect Id: This is a unique, system-generated serial number for every defect.  User cannot modify Defect Id from the K-Bridge Defect Tracking System ® user interface.  As the defect is logged, defect reporter's information also automatically gets captured with the defect.

  • Summary: This is a brief description of the defect that helps resources to easily identify an defect.

  • Defect symptom:   Defect reporter selects the predefined defect symptom.  If the defect symptom is not available, new defect symptom can also specified with additional information.

  • Priority:  This provides priority level of the defect.  When a defect is logged, by default the defect priority is set to "Medium". 

    Following describes the priorities offered by K-Bridge Defect Tracking System ® in the decreasing order of importance:

    • Critical - This priority is assigned when a defect stops a product/process to function normally.  And because of that it affects customer's business to completely shutdown or stop functioning entirely.

    • High -This priority is assigned when a defect stops product/process to function normally or causes important feature of the product/process to seriously malfunction.  And because of that it affects customer's business seriously.

    • Medium - This priority is assigned when a defect is largely performance related.  If the defect causes product/process to perform at slower speed, medium priority should be assigned to the defect. Medium priority is also assigned if the defect is functionality related and the alternative is available as a stop gap measure.

    • Low - This priority is assigned when a defect is related to extreme corner case and defect has a very little impact on the normal operation of the product/process.
       

  • Project: Name of the project for which the defect is logged.  K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® provides separate tool to define the project information.

  • Phase: Phase of the project for which the defect is reported.  Project phases are defined with the project information.

  • Module: Module for which the defect is reported.  Project modules are defined along with the project information.

  • Sub Module: Sub module for which the defect is reported.  Project sub modules are defined along with the project information.

  • Issue Type: This provides type of defects being logged.  It can be either problem, suggestion, or task.

  • Description: This is a detailed description of the defect.  This should cover defect symptoms, behavior, potential effects, how to reproduce the defect, etc. Defect description should be written in such a way that the next person who is involved in the defect resolution can easily understand the defect without calling the person who originally logged an defect in the system.

  • Affected Products: This provides list of products affected by the defect.  K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® provides separate tool to provide information on the products.

  • Software Details: Details of the software for which the defect is being logged.

  • Dependency: Dependency information of the defect.

  • Troubleshooting Details: Defect reporter provides the troubleshooting details if he/she has attempted to isolate defect.

  • Attachments:  This allows person handling the defect to attach one or more files that are perceived to be relevant to the defect.  This helps down the line resources to deal with the defect because all relevant files are already available with the defect.  Typical examples of attachment files are: log files, system dumps, configuration files, screen captures, MS Office Application files, etc.

  • Status: This is an indicator of the current status of a defect.  Defect status helps defect requester, reviewers, fixers, and defect testers to view the current status of the defect without contacting each other. K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® provides following different types of status values:

  • Logged - Defect is entered in the system and no additional action is performed on the defect.  Defects with "Logged" status are treated as "Open" defects in the system.

  • Reviewed & Approved - Defect is reviewed and has been approved by reviewer as a valid defect.  Generally upon review of defect, priority is assigned to the defect.  Defects with "Reviewed & Approved" status are treated as "Open" defects in the system.

  • Reviewed & Cancelled - Defect is reviewed and has been cancelled by reviewer because it is not valid defect.  Defects with "Reviewed and Cancelled" are treated as "Closed" defects in the system.

  • In Progress - Defects is in process of being fixed.  These defects are treated as "Open" defects in the system.

  • Fixed -  Defect is fixed however may be going through testing and verification.  Please note that the defects that are in "Fixed" status are perceived as "Open" defects in the system.

  • Tested & Closed -  Defect is tested and closed.  Please note that the defects that are "Tested & Closed" are treated as "Closed" defects in the system.

For the ease of access, the defect status values are classified into two distinct classes - Open and Closed.  Following describes which defect status values fall in the Open class of defects and which ones fall in the Closed class of defects in the K-Bridge Defect Tracking System ®: 

  • Open - Logged, Reviewed & Approved, In Progress, Fixed

  • Closed - Reviewed & Cancelled, Tested & Closed

  • Assigned to: This field identifies who is currently in-charge of the defect for further action.  K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® allows person dealing with the defect an ability to modify this field so that defect can be transferred to another employee's personal queue or general queue for further action. 

    Please note that by moving defect to another employee's personal queue instantly makes that employee new in-charge of the defect.  If defect is moved to general queue, all the employees who are subscribing the general queue becomes jointly responsible for the further action on the defect.  As soon as one of the employees subscribing that general queue moves an defect from general queue to his/her personal queue, he/she becomes the new in-charge of the defect.

  • Solution: This field provides user to enter the solution text for the defect.  Please note that user can enter/modify the solution text for the current modification.   User cannot modify the previously entered text in the solution field.

  • Solution History: This field provides user the read-only history of solution text entered during the previous defect modifications. 

  • Issue History: This field tracks the history of defect creation, modifications, and even viewing by the other resources.  This field is automatically populated as defect is being logged, viewed, qualified, rejected, and resolved.

Please note that the special attributes are different for different types of defects. 

  1. As soon as the defect submission is filled, defect is automatically routed to the responsible resource/group for further action.  For automatic defect routing upon defect submission, mapping needs to be provided between products/projects to appropriate queue/s (which could be personal queue or general queue depending upon the workflow required by the organization). 

  2. As the responsible person/s deals with the defect, it traverses through the workflow queues of K-Bridge Defect Tracking System ® provided workflow involves multiple queues.

  3. Once a defect is closed it remains in the active database for six months.  If defect does not get modified in six months, defect automatically gets archived in the archive database. Users however can search and access defects from both active and archive databases.

  4. K-Bridge Defect Tracking System® provides various types of reports for the management reporting to project leaders, project managers, K-Bridge Defect Tracking System Administrators.

Apart from the features described above, K-Bridge Defect Tracking System ® provides many administrative features such as: automatic backup, automatic database indexing, user authorization, project and product information management.  Contact K-Bridge Inc. for additional information on K-Bridge Defect Tracking System®.
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Architecture

As shown in the figure, K-Bridge Defect Tracking System ® is made up of two sub-systems.  They are: (1) K-Bridge Resource Information System, (2) K-Bridge Defect Tracking System®.  Functions of these subsystems are described in the following sections.

Please note that K-Bridge Inc. provides K-Bridge Information System® (KBIS) and K-Bridge Portal Enabler System® (KBPE) along with the deployment of K-Bridge Defect Tracking System®.  If organization has previous installations of KBIS and KBPE, they can be leveraged to deploy the K-Bridge Defect Tracking System®.  KBIS provides ready-to-use information management system features and KBPE provides customizable portal and secure access to the users.

K-Bridge Resource Information System®

This is a web based system that helps organization manage its issue workflow resources.  It provides ability to add, modify, deactivate, and remove issue workflow resources through easy to use interface.  It also provides ability to manage resource skills & competencies, internal and external organization locations, organization structure, salary structure, designations, and country information.  Upon deployment, K-Bridge Resource Information System® also provides directory of issue workflow resources in the organization.

K-Bridge Defect Tracking System ®

This is a core system that provides all the features of defect tracking and management and workflow.  Most of the feature are already described in the overview section.

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