As a programmer the bane of my existence is the dreaded bug. As a PHP coder what I despise most are people who submit inadequate bugs. At my previous place of employment there was very little buffer between the enduser and the coders. The channel tended to be enduser -> support personnel -> either a.) my boss or b.) me. My former boss, bless his heart, did all he could to shield myself and others from the onslaught of dupes, etc.

The worst part was that there was absolutely no buffer between the dev team and those who worked in the office. This meant that the dev team would regularily get bugs like this: “Login not working!” Really? We have 10’ish domains all with separate login scripts. What browser were you using? What OS? What username did you try? Have you logged in successfully before? After much back and forth you could possibly fill out half of the required material in your average Bugzilla bug posting. After many failed attempts to teach the team how to correctly report a bug and a few ignored requests to either build or implement a bug tracking system, I gave up.

At my new place of employment I’m one of two developers. The bosses give us a lot of range in developing various technology policies. These two facts have lead me to develop a new system called “Bugger.” It’s not an amazing piece of software, but it’s tailored to my liking and specific to web programming. With a little tweaking of my php.ini file I can have users and or employees easily submit bugs that have all the info I could want (Browser, URI, etc.).

My only complaint about it is that I won’t be able to release it. I was paid to create it so it is property of the company I work for. I could probably make the case that we should open up the source, but I should probably make sure it’s complete first.