Bug Tracking

We all like to believe that our SaaS products are perfect. In reality, many apps are hastily cobbled together in a rush to ship the MVP or make ourselves look good in front of investors. Most apps have some sort of bugs, from minor ones all the way to major issues that could deter customers from using your product.

No matter how good your development team is, bugs will happen. The best thing that you can do is spot them in time and track them. In fact, bug tracking is one of the best things that you can do for your customer success and the health of your product.

What is Bug Tracking?

Bug tracking is the process of identifying and monitoring faults in products and making a case for prioritizing them and fixing them. To create a software product that works as intended and solves your customers’ problems.

Typically, bugs are logged and tracked during the product testing phase. However, many of them can be found later on. 

Source

The important thing is to have a system in place where not just your team but your customers have a way to report a bug, describe it and send it your way. Ideally, they also get notified once you make comments and start working on fixing the bug.

In terms of ROI, bug tracking is one of the most useful activities you can undertake as a SaaS business owner.

What is FeedBear?

FeedBear is the all-in-one customer feedback tool that you didn’t know your SaaS product needs. With FeedBear, you can become a truly customer-centric company that listens to what their users have to say and is transparent about the plans for your product.

With FeedBear, you can collect ideas and feedback from your customers and communicate with them easily and at scale. You can also create public and product roadmaps to show your customers what the future holds for your product.

FeedBear customers use the app in a variety of different ways, from feature requests to bug reports and creating roadmaps all the way to creating changelogs. Try it out here for free!

How Can Bug Tracking Help Development Projects?

Instinctively, we all know that tracking bugs and imperfections in a SaaS product can be massively helpful in reducing churn, improving customer retention and product adoption, and many other things. Here are some practical ways in which bug tracking helps with the more technical side of things.

Delivering a great product

The first benefit is the most obvious one. When you track bugs, you fix all the flaws that make your final product less than perfect.

Prioritization of work

When bug reports come in (and especially if there are many about the same bugs), it means that you need to assign developers to fix them, simple as that. Depending on how many come in, you can assign workload to your development team.

Improved customer communication

If you not only track bugs but act on the feedback provided by the customers, you’re presenting yourself a customer-centric company that cares about the people who use their product.

Discovering problems earlier

You can have the best QA team in the world but they can’t figure out all the ways your product can break - because they’re not your customers. Bug tracking allows you to spot problematic areas earlier.

Saving time and money

When you know exactly what needs fixing and your immediate attention, you won’t fix the bugs and add the features your customers don’t want. You’ll save time because you won’t focus on the wrong features and bugs and you’ll save money - because you won’t lose any customers.

As you can see, noticing bugs in time and fixing issues as they come up has multiple benefits for your SaaS product. To help you track bugs more efficiently, you can use a feedback tool such as FeedBear.

How Does FeedBear Help Track Bugs? 

When it comes to tracking bugs, FeedBear customers have different ways of using our product. 

Depending on your needs and your product management setup, you can try out one or more of these approaches and see what works best for you.

A single board for bug reports

This approach works well as you keep things nice and clean. Some FeedBear users have a single board where their customers add nothing but bug reports. This makes it easy to categorize, label and manage all of your bug reports. It’s also super easy for customers to find existing bug reports before filing a new one.

Using a feature requests board

Some FeedBear users have a single board for all their customer feedback. This includes feature requests, bug reports and other feedback ideas. This makes sense if you want

all of your customer feedback lumped in one place. It helps your customers find everything in one location and facilitates communication for your customer support and product teams.

Once you decide on where customers should file bug reports, you’re ready for the next step.

Move your bug reports to the next stage

Not all bugs are really bugs and not all of them demand immediate action. Once a bug comes in, your customers will be able to discuss it (on the board you created) and vote for it. More votes = the fix is more urgent.

If you decide to work on the bug immediately, you can change its status, which immediately notifies everyone who created the bug report, commented, or voted on it. Every time the status changes (e.g. the bug is fixed), they get notified too.

(Optional) Move bug reports to your roadmap

If you have a product roadmap, you can use it for more than upcoming features. If you want to, you can also add major bug fixes to the roadmap. Whether you want to do this or not, depends on how much the bug impacts your overall customer experience.

What are the Benefits of Using FeedBear for Bug Tracking?

If you like what FeedBear offers, you’ll be glad to hear that there are quite a few benefits of using it to track bugs for your SaaS product. Here are the most important ones.

Keeping everything in one place

All of your customer feedback and bug reports are in a single place. Your idea board is the central hub for customer feedback entries. This lets you categorize them more easily and you’ll avoid duplicates as customers can quickly see what’s already been reported.

Closing the feedback loop

When a bug gets fixed, you want the customer who reported it to know that issue has been resolved. Usually, you’d have to track them down manually but FeedBear notifies them automatically as you change the status of their bug report.

Adding bug fixes to your roadmap

If a bug makes a major impact on your product, you can easily add it to your roadmap straight from the FeedBear idea board.

Keeping an open line of communication

In the bug report on your idea board, your customers can discuss the issue with each other and the members of your team.

In general, FeedBear does a great job of capturing customer feedback (be it in form of bug reports, feature requests, or something else) and closing the feedback loop.

Wrapping up

If you’re looking for one tool that will be the best bug tracking software in addition to many other useful customer feedback features, FeedBear is a product that you can use to facilitate better communication with your customers, track bugs, collect feature requests and do much more to become a customer-centric SaaS company. If you want to get started today, sign up for a free trial!