Once you have determined how to handle the issues involved in a defect tracking process, you can implement it. There are many ways to do this, two of the largest challenges being maintaining the request information, and dissemination of the current state of the process to the individuals involved in making it happen.

ProblemTracker provides a framework to implement your defect tracking process, and in many ways can be thought of as a programmable general workflow engine. All the states, rules, and individuals that as a whole define your process can be entered into ProblemTracker. ProblemTracker makes it easy for all your users to follow the correct process and access real-time information about the state of any record in the system.

The following two sections discuss in some detail the sample databases provided with ProblemTracker, ptdev.mdb and ptweb.mdb, and the bug tracking process supported by each.