Customers

DevTrack Provides Inova with a Versatile and Intuitive Bug Tracking Solution

Inova Corporation (www.Inovacorp.com) has been providing solutions for the monitoring and distribution of real-time information since 1984. Inova’s core focus is the development of professional-quality message and alert software and hardware for call centers and transit environments. A market leader with over 2,500 systems installed worldwide, Inova is a privately held company located in Charlottesville, VA.

Inova’s engineering team of 15 people is responsible for real time data capture and delivery solutions for call centers and companies that have critical information that they need their agents to see.

Inova Corporation Selects DevTrack

Inova was previously using TrackRecord by Compuware Corporation but started looking into other solutions because they were frequently experiencing data corruption. With every instance of data corruption, records would inevitably be lost and Inova would have to rebuild its database. “It was extremely frustrating and very time consuming,” explained Hugh Stiteler, Inova’s Software Quality Assurance (SQA) Manager.

Inova looked at a number of different products but nothing really stood out until they came across DevTrack. Mr. Stiteler explained, “The biggest benefit of DevTrack was that we could import our current records into DevTrack and not lose any data.” He found that the user interface made it easy to understand what was going on and also make it very easy to use the product.

DevTrack in Action

Inova’s Software Quality Assurance (SQA) team is responsible for testing and locating bugs. The SQA team uses DevTrack to write up problems and then directly assign them to the appropriate developer. When a bug is assigned, both the developer and his manager receive an email notifying them that there is a new bug in their queue. Once the developer checks his queue, he decides whether to fix the problem or to assign it another status such as “As Designed” or “Duplicate”, depending on the nature of the bug. When the developer fixes the problem, he marks it “Test Ready” and the bug is sent back to the SQA department where it is tested to make sure the bug is fixed. If the bug has not been fixed, then it is marked as “Resubmitted” and sent back to the developer with an email telling them that the bug has been returned.

Inova has found DevTrack to be so versatile that they are using it to track field problems and feature requests. For field problems, the customer support staff takes incoming calls regarding already released products. If they are unable to resolve the problem themselves, they enter it into DevTrack to have a developer resolve the issue. The feature request database allows developers to separate bugs from those new features and feature enhancements that would be ‘nice to have’ but aren’t quite as time sensitive.

Reports Provide Measureable Results

Every Monday, a number of reports are generated to recap the previous week. With these customizable reports, Mr. Stiteler is able to specify the areas he’d like to analyze such as bug classification, priority of problems over the entire project span. He explains, “The reports really help to point out where the biggest hang-ups and bottlenecks are in our development process. Especially at the end of a project, the reports really help us weed out the problems that absolutely must be fixed before we can release from those that would be ‘nice to fix’, but aren’t absolutely necessary.”

Other Key Features

Mr. Stiteler mentioned the following features as being some of the most valuable to Inova Corporation:

• Customization – Easily able to add fields that are important. Also able to add radio buttons and check boxes to projects when appropriate.
• Searching Capability – Able to save searches for future use and it really allows you to zero in on what you are looking for.
• Linking – Able to link field problems to a current problem in the database. Also able to link a bunch of related problems.
• Email – When emailing a bug to a developer, able to add some information in order to ask a question about the particular bug.

Overall Experience with DevTrack

“I would definitely recommend DevTrack,” said Mr. Stiteler. “I think the ease of use is the best feature. I’ve never had a new developer come to me and say ‘How do I use this?’ It’s very intuitive.”

He also likes the ability to export data to a new project and explains, “As you move to the next release of a product, you can move the open problems to the new project and leave the old (resolved) ones behind.”

Looking back at some of the frustrations with TrackRecord, Mr. Stiteler says, “We haven’t had any data corruption with DevTrack and that’s been terrific.”

He concludes, “I’ve been in SQA for 17 years and DevTrack is probably the best defect tracking solution I’ve seen.”