Joel Spolsky's company, Fog Creek, has released FogBUGZ 3.0. Joel has some interesting ideas on what a bug tracking system should and shouldn't do:
For example, inspired by software testing guru Cem Kaner and of course Dr. Deming, FogBUGZ does not provide individual performance metrics for people. If you want a report for which programmer makes the most bugs, or the infamous "which programmer has the most bugs that they allegedly 'fixed' reopened by testing because they were not really fixed," FogBUGZ won't give it to you. Why? Because as soon as you start measuring people and compensating people based on things like this, they are going to start optimizing their behavior to optimize these numbers, and not in the way you intended. Every bug report becomes an argument. Programmers insist on recategorizing bugs as "features." Or they refuse to check in code until the performance review period is over. Testers are afraid to enter bugs -- why antagonize programmers? And pretty soon, the measurements give you what you "wanted": the number of bugs in the bug tracking system goes down to zero. Of course, there are just as many bugs in the code, those are an inevitable part of writing software, they're just not being tracked. And the bug tracking software, hijacked as an HR crutch, becomes worthless for what it was intended for.
