Top 7 Bug Management Tools Every Product Team Should Know

Introduction

Product managers are the guides who lead development teams to success. They surely work hard to boost management everyday, especially when working in the tech field. As you probably know, there’s a never-ending war on bugs in software development. What strategy do you have when it comes to terminating the bugs lurking inside your projects?

Thanks to this post, all those who have problems with bugs can learn about the best bug management tools available to deal with them and how to organize developers’ work to help your software meet its specification. We will cover the topic of tools helpful in bug management, task assignments and software development processes.

Scroll down to discover the most popular bug management tools every top dev team use! Discover their pros & cons and choose the one perfect for you.

Why should you focus on bug management?

Firstly, we have to explain why bugs in software must be tracked. In the bug tracking process, special tools help you identify, report, and prioritize bugs in order to deal with them.

Why is it so important? Your clients and their users want to have a working piece of code, a seamless piece of software. And every development team’s main responsibility is to check everything, including errors in software before its release.

Unmanaged bugs can:

• ruin your company’s reputation on the market,
• cause you to lose revenue,
• take up developers’ precious time to fix and build new features.

Treat bug management as just any other task to complete in the development process in order to write better code and keep your partners, clients and users satisfied.

Best bug management tools your team should try

#1 Jira

This is the most popular tool for managing projects (and bugs), offered by Atlassian. Jira can be called one of the best bug management tools that teams can use to identify, organize, report and fix bugs in an intuitive, easy, and visual way. The tool is used mostly in Agile project development and perfectly filters reported issues and bugs.

Key characteristics that lead developers to choose Jira:

1. Customizable workflows – your tasks can be arranged and connected as needed, while rules you set using clicks let you perform actions responsive to current changes.
2. A very rich set of features – Scrum, Kanban boards, roadmaps, Agile reporting.
3. Integration with a variety of other products – boosts productivity and automates your work.

Why some look for alternatives:

Jira may be found quite expensive by companies with small to medium teams. Also, some complain about quite complex configuration and troubleshooting so it takes a while to “master”. Sometimes Jira’s multitude of notifications may be irritating.

#2 Asana

Asana as a bug management tool offers an overview of the team’s work using roadmap creation and tracking goals. This way, you can set long term goals and monitor the development team’s progress. Asana makes it possible to collect, track, report, and prioritize all your bugs in one place.

Why choose Asana:

1. Template task/form – you can have all the information you need in one place instead of receiving a torrent of detailed reports and notifications from various channels.
2. Bug manager identification – you know who is fixing a given bug by assigning a chosen person to manage a specific bug; you have all the details, the deadline and see the progress.
3. Custom fields for priorities – to ensure important problems are being fixed, keep your team focused on dealing with the most important bugs that may hinder processes (some other bugs will wait in queue to be fixed later).
4. Sortable bugs categories – you can set custom fields to see some patterns and have an overview of what kind of bugs you have to deal with most often.

Why some managers prefer other bug management tools:

1. Projects can be complex because of “feature-overload” – to those who are not pros in project management, you will not need all of the features offered by Asana. To avoid feeling overloaded and confused, use other alternative tool.
2. Limits in tasks – a lot of people do not like the fact that Asana lets you assign tasks in a project to just one user. This would not work for teams where several people work together on 1 task.

#3 Wrike

Wrike has a minimalist UI and 2 categories of features: for team collaboration and project management. These features support teams in managing time, tracking projects’ dependencies, managing assignments and resources. When it comes to Wrike as one of the bug management tools, it looks like this: software developer gets a task logged into the tool -> project manager has the full overview of tasks given and can follow the progress of each task -> developer fixes a bug in a given task -> the bug is marked as “complete” in Wrike -> and finally a PM receives a notification about it.

Pros of Wrike:

1. Effortless teamwork – thanks to the use of tasks, the team members can easily cooperate, getting detailed notification of each other’s task progress.
2. Seamless integration – integrate this tool with your email and tag other members, sending updates, comments and feedback on current projects.
3. Multi assignment of projects – you can relate 1 task to several projects (avoiding duplicate tasks); a useful feature when you have multiple goals due at one time applying to multiple projects.
4. Wrike has built-in Gantt charts – so you do not have to integrate with other software.

Why Wrike may not be the optimal choice for your team:

1. Tasks may be hard to break into smaller bits – big tasks often mean many files, comments, and updates – the list grows lightning fast with 1 task and Wrike doesn’t have any option to break tasks up (however, a Project in Wrike can be broken up into subprojects or subfolders).
2. “Scattered”, may cause distraction – this tool is quite developed and can seem to be cluttered, hard to find options fast and navigate; users have to spend some time on mastering it.

#4 Trello

Another very popular program with a simple and friendly layout, used not only as a bug management tool – its project is made up of boards containing lists of tasks to do (as cards you would stick to the board). In Trello every project can be assigned to 1 or a number of users, moved, changed, and archived. You can add checklists, attachments, and comments.

Why Trello is a great option among bug management tools:

1. Your progress is visible and easily manageable – the boards are so easy to follow, navigate and understand that you and your clients will be always on track with managed bugs, having a simple overview of what’s going on within a project.
2. Labels filter cards – this is an important feature that helps you to set categories for every bug-related purpose. Take a look at how you can categorize bugs with labels: every label can be named e.g. “critical”,, “major”, “minor”, or “trivial” and can be color-coded.
3. Attach screenshots to your cards – Trello works with Marker to enable fast attachment of screenshots to the projects. You can either use “Power-Up” to browse and attach screens that already exist in your Trello projects or capture screenshots from websites and send them to a chosen card.
4. Calendar with tasks – in Trello you can obviously set a due date for any task/project and synch the due dates with calendar on every board you have. This helps not only to manage bugs but also time.
5. Integrations – Trello integrates with Slack, GitHub, and Salesforce.

Why Trello may not be a perfect tool:

1. May seem to be “crowded” – even though items can be organized into specific tasks and cards, once a board collects a large number of cards, the board can easily get crowded and cluttered.
2. No time tracking & estimate functionality – unfortunately Trello does not have time tracking capabilities either.
3. No overview – there’s no way to add a project overview or any sub-task functionality.

#5 Kanbanize

This Agile PM tool supports teams of any size in organization and management of effective work by keeping track of ongoing projects. Kanbanize lets cross functional teams manage multiple projects. It has a lot of features that provide support from the initial phases such as planning and brainstorming, through realization and development to final delivery.

Also, Kanbanize is said to have a well developed analytics module, providing the users with various workflow charts where data is automatically loaded. The tool’s functionalities can be extended thanks to many possible integrations with a lot of popular systems supporting teamwork.

What makes a Kanbanize different from other bug management tools:

1. Easy to start – even for those haven’t used the Kanban methodology before, this tool will not be hard to use.
2. Kanbanize and Usersnap – this connection will create bugs reports with annotations, additional info. What’s more, it’s possible to record advanced JavaScript errors on the client side the moment they happen.
3. Great reports – the engine behind reports is often praised by users as it provides a project overview and tips regarding breaking complex projects into smaller parts/tasks. Together with “issue reporting”, the tool gives you visual information about every project.

What could be better:

1. Analytics – this feature requires a closer look into what a user wants to measure and how to interpret the reports. Generally using Kanbanize takes some of your time to start working with its flow and master its features.
2. Layout – users tend to indicate that it is a little bit old fashioned and that could be refreshed and more visual.
3. No budget management – unfortunately, managing budget or tracking costs-to-completion is not possible.
4. Cannot be used offline – so users cannot check what is happening or make changes, eg. change a bug’s status, without an internet connection.

#6 Notion

This tool category in the PM is “tech stack” (defined as programming languages, frameworks, and tools used by developers to create applications). Notion means management, unification, and collaboration for every development team.

Why choose Notion out of all bug management tools on the market:

1. Versatile and user-friendly – users say that Notion supports them at work and at home; it is described as stable, fast, easy-to-use and portable.
2. It’s truly Agile – Notion allows you to create an agile board in a few seconds and turn it into a table to share with your team/client at the same time.
3. A cross-referential tool – you can link tickets to your meetings table and refer them to other databases. Also, Notion is a cross-platform tool, so your team and clients/developers with Android, iOS, Windows, & Mac OSX can use it.
4. Have all tickets in one database – by doing so, Notion allows you to filter by projects and at the same time see the whole progress of all the projects and individual developer’s work.

Why you could complain about this tool:

1. No automation option – unfortunately, Notion does not have a public API. There are no possible integrations with other apps, and this can be limiting for some teams.
2. It is still missing some things – this tool does not let you collect information, and doesn’t have a web clipper or collecting boards by email addresses.

#7 Airtable

This is a cloud-based PM tool for small to midsize teams as well as for departments in larger organizations. Airtable offers a system focusing mainly on organizing data and facilitating team collaboration. As the word “table” in Airtable may suggest, this management tool uses a spreadsheet format. It is a real-time database hybrid powerful enough to use it as a CRM, tasks manager, project planner, and so on.

Why Airtable deserves a place on our the best bug management tools list:

1. Two visual perspectives on bugs – you can check the bugs in your project whether on a kanban board or on a grid – the option is on the dropdown; you can switch between views freely.
2. Bug formula fields – the tool’s template allows automatic change of formulas when certain conditions occur.
3. Attachments to bugs – you can add GIFs, comments, screenshots directly to any bug recorded.
4. Tracking and fIltering bugs – thanks to this streamlined tool, you can sort out bugs by their priority or status. You can also see affected systems by known bugs to prepare for meetings with developers/clients or provide professional support.

What Airtable is missing:

1. There is no time tracking feature – this could be a good resource when time management is essential
2. Takes time to master – users with no data background may have problems at the beginning.

Summary

Now you have 7 different bug management tools to choose from, but making the choice might prove tough. Below, we offer you some hints that should help you to decide which tool is best for managing the process of developing your mobile or web app.

In order to pick the perfect bug tracking tool, consider some individual factors such as your team’s size, team’s needs, whether you need just bug management or a versatile tool that supports many other needs connected with project management, or whether your team needs access to various data.

Here, in short, we present some core features of any bug management tool:

• identifies and track bugs with a feature that lets you create names for them,
• protects information about users’ actions, expectations, and outcomes,
• assigns priorities to issues/ tasks,
• shows current state of every bug/issue/task,
• sorts, filters, searches, reports bugs.

We hope that this overview inspired you to choose the right tool that will boost both project and bug management. Share it with anyone who works with managing teams and may be looking for a professional yet brief overview on this topic. Overall, we wish you few bugs in your future projects.