Issue Management

In this role recently I've been experiencing first hand the role of issue management and tracking in software development teams. When I started this role issue management was barely managed. For our .NET and web projects issue tracking was done through a custom software package written in classic ASP. This package was originally written because buying a package that is customisable is very expensive. I can't begin to imagine how much it would have cost to develop this software internally instead of buying a proven customisable package from an external company. For our other projects we use team track. I'm not usually a fan of closed source software, but this tool is fantastic. It's expensive, roughly 1200 per professional lisence, but well worth it. I have integrated the tool heavily into all aspects of our work now and our productivity has never been higher. We can track all the issue we work on quantitatively and all in one system that is so easily configured for each project or any processes that come up. Exposing this information to the business where required is also very easy and quite cheap as only the developers need full licenses and maybe the support team if they require a hand on approach to software development. I don't usually advocate software for no reason. What I'm getting at is that an adequate software solution to issue management is very important and productivity can really be positively affected by tight management and control of all issues.