It seems like noone has managed to invent a bug tracking system that can do search well.  Bugzilla’s famous for having a lousy search interface but its not just interface – I’m yet to find a bug tracking system that can search for a find bugs I’m looking for consistently.

This becomes particularly annoying when you are trying to avoid logging duplicate bugs as you have to spend ages crafting search queries to try and identify whether or not the bug has previously been reported.

The worst bug tracker for this has to be Sun’s bug parade.  It’s practically impossible to find anything in that database. Maybe there’s a magical search page somewhere that lets me specify a version to force it to match instead of having it tell me about bugs that were logged against JRE 1.0-pre or some ridiculously ancient version. I know for a fact that the bug is new in the Java 1.6 previews, it didn’t happen in previous versions, why can’t I just search the Java 1.6 bugs?

So I’ve now got two or three bugs that I’ve found with Java 1.6 that I just don’t have time to log properly so they’re sitting in the todo list. I suspect quite a few other people are in the same boat because the bugs I have reported so far are identified as new issues by Sun but seem pretty obvious. For example, in the Java 1.6 builds you can’t use combo boxes, popup menus or menus in an applet on Windows – the menu disappears immediately after it appears preventing you from making a selection. Now menus in applets aren’t particularly common, but combo boxes are – how has this not been reported by someone before me?

So here’s a tip to any project that wants good feedback – find yourself a bug tracker that is sensational at search, or provide a simple bug report form for users and encourage them to just log any issue and not worry about whether it’s a duplicate or not. Oddly enough Apple does this with their hugely criticized bug tracker and I’m beginning to understand why. Of course, Apple then screw up bug tracking in a whole range of other ways so it tends to cancel out.