Guide · Bug tracking

How to track bugs during software development

A practical playbook for small and medium development teams that want to move from spreadsheets and Slack threads to a real bug tracking workflow — without slowing anyone down.

Why dedicated bug tracking matters

Spreadsheets, chat messages and email threads work until they don't. As soon as more than two people touch the same product, bugs start getting lost, duplicated, or silently reintroduced. A proper bug tracker gives every issue a single source of truth: who reported it, where it happens, what changed, and whether it's fixed.

The 7 bug tracking best practices we recommend

1. One ticket, one bug. Never bundle unrelated issues in the same ticket — it makes triage and release notes painful.
2. Always capture reproduction steps. Steps, expected result, actual result. If it's a UI bug, attach a screenshot or a short screen recording.
3. Record the environment. Browser, OS, app version, user role, and the URL where it happened. Half of "cannot reproduce" tickets are missing this.
4. Triage on a schedule. A short daily or every-other- day triage is more effective than a huge weekly one.
5. Use severity, not just priority. Severity describes impact on users; priority describes when the team will fix it.
6. Link bugs to code changes. Reference the ticket ID in commits and pull requests. Regression hunting later becomes trivial.
7. Close the loop with reporters. Notify the person who filed the bug when it ships. It dramatically increases the quality of future reports.

A minimal bug tracking workflow

Most teams don't need a 12-status Jira workflow. Four states cover the vast majority of cases:

• Open — reported, not yet triaged.
• In progress — assigned and being worked on.
• In review — fix ready, awaiting verification.
• Closed — verified fixed in production.

Add a Reopened transition for bugs that come back — it's a strong signal that a regression test is missing.

What a good bug report contains

• Short, specific title (not "it's broken").
• Steps to reproduce, numbered.
• Expected vs actual behavior.
• Screenshot, video, or console log when relevant.
• Environment: browser, OS, version, user account.
• Severity: blocking, major, minor, cosmetic.

Moving off spreadsheets

Spreadsheets have no notifications, no permissions, no history, and no way to attach a screenshot inline. The moment two engineers edit the same row, you lose data. A lightweight tracker like Bugly gives you projects, tickets, mentions, activity history and email notifications out of the box — with the same speed as writing a row in a sheet.

Measuring the health of your bug backlog

Two numbers tell you almost everything: average time to resolution (in working hours, not calendar hours) and the ratio of opened vs closed tickets over the last 30 days. If opens outpace closes for several weeks, the team is falling behind and needs either more capacity or stricter triage.

Get started

Pick a workflow, standardize the bug report template, and put every new report in one place. If you'd like a tool built exactly around this workflow, create a free Bugly account and invite your team in a couple of minutes.