The Enterprise Standard Database
For Tracking Bugs, Feature Requests, Calls And Much More
- If you want to fulfill your obligations to your customers, you need to keep track of all of their problems, complaints and requests.
- If you want to improve your product, you must keep track of everything that goes wrong, so that you can be sure that you have fixed it.
- If you want your projects to succeed, you have to keep track of what everyone is supposed to do and how well they are doing it.
- If you want to improve your development process, you must learn from the past, and constantly improve what you are doing.
TRACK is a very powerful and robust client/server database that will help you to keep track of all these details. TRACK will make sure that everyone knows what's going on and what they're supposed to do about it. TRACK will be able to monitor virtually everything you need to know to succeed.
Although TRACK was developed as a bug-tracking system, Peter Coffee of PC Week said that he preferred the term "quality assurance support system." That's because TRACK is not only used in developing new product, but because it is used throughout the product's life. Every complaint and every customer request can be used to improve your product if you have an effective system like TRACK.
It doesn't matter how large your organization grows to be. TRACK can streamline communications and problem solving need in the largest multinational corporation located around the world. TRACK automatically and effortlessly connects the right people associated with development, quality assurance, release control, project management, engineering, sales, technical support, training and public relations.
More than 12,000 corporate customers worldwide have selected TRACK after thoroughly analyzing their alternatives. Unlike other systems, TRACK is flexible, uses industry standard databases and is backed by Soffront's unparalleled technical support.
A Ready-To-Use Package That You Can Easily Customize
To start using TRACK, all you have to do is install it. Right out of the box, TRACK's built-in screens will help you keep track of most of the details that you need. You'll be able to enter details about defects, your system configurations, the customers, who's going to fix the problem, the progress being made and much more. The default data fields and forms are all that you will need to immediately improve the way you handle bug reports.
However, as your need changes, you will want to keep track of many other details. TRACK makes it extremely easy to create custom fields, forms, views and reports to capture and communicate any additional data that you need. The powerful Form Layout editor allows you to create, place, size and align fields with a point and click interface that minimizes administrative overhead. Then in a single step, TRACK updates the database, queries, and reports to fit your new customized structure.
TRACK is so easy to customize that you will eventually use it to keep track of almost any detail that is relevant to your business. TRACK provides eleven different field types, which can be calculated fields, or which can automatically notify other users, for example. TRACK has the power to establish one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships between records on different tables with a linking button.
TRACK can therefore be used as a central repository for keeping track of ALL your information about customers and the products you are providing for them. TRACK will help you become far more customer-driven by linking your development, quality assurance, help desks, training department, technical support specialists, sales department and users for the life-cycle of your products.
Customizing TRACK will give you more control over your data entry, security, distribution and use than building an in-house system which you must maintain and enhance. In fact, the people who appreciate TRACK most are those who have previously written and maintained their own in-house systems.
A User-Friendly Product, Easy To Use At Every Level
Our goal in designing TRACK was to create a product that hundreds of people in an organization could use effectively without even reading the documentation. Customers tell us that we've succeeded.
For example, TRACK has powerful and intuitive search capabilities. With virtually no training, users can do an ad hoc search for the information they need directly on the current screen using the Query by Example method. With the Query Builder dialog, it's even simple to learn to build the most complex search expressions with wild cards and relational operators.
TRACK lets you automate the process further for nontechnical staff. As the TRACK administrator, you can create, save, and share custom queries and reports with any group of users. Any user who knows how to use Windows can effectively use TRACK with no further training.
Automatic Notification Eliminates Weak Communication Links
In most organizations, project coordination depends on regular and appropriate communication between people who are already too busy. It can be challenging to keep track of who needs to know what at every step. Poor management of communications can neutralize the work of the most brilliant engineer.
Included in the standard TRACK package is an E-Mail notification feature which can be used to coordinate the work of large organizations. By automatically notifying both local and remote users, TRACK replaces localized bug tracking systems in individual areas. In this way, it solves many of the communication problems that can arise between users that are separated geographically.
TRACK selectively notifies the right people about new bugs and important updates using its own mail system, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Mail, cc:Mail, or Lotus Notes. It even automatically checks for duplicate mail entries so that no one gets redundant notifications.
With TRACK, you will no longer be kept in the dark _ and neither will anyone else be. If you need to know, you will.
Create Powerful Presentations With Flexible Reporting Options
At Soffront, we realize that the power of the information you gather depends on how well you present it. So TRACK provides you with the right tools to present the facts clearly in the format that you need.
Right off the shelf, you can quickly produce, preview and print several useful predefined reports. However, it is also simple to target your presentations more precisely by customizing your report formats.
TRACK gives you complete control over which fields to include in the report, including query and sort fields. It does not limit you to any predefined set of fields, and you can arrange them in any way that suits your need. Then TRACK does the rest of the work, managing all of the design and formatting details with ease.
You can use TRACK, for example, to create reports that break down defects by severity, the methods used to find them and who found them. You can classify defects by the product or by the module within the product. You can use any field _ including your own custom fields _ to classify the defects.
TRACK's versatile reporting options include summary, tabular, detailed, graphical trend, and distribution reports. TRACK is integrated with Crystal Reports, a popular and powerful third-party reporting package. Finally, you can view multiple reports side by side for easier analysis.
Monitoring Change With Track and Your Version Control System
When combined with your version control system, TRACK keeps track of what went wrong, how you fixed it, what went right and other results of your development work. With this information, you can accurately forecast what you're going to do next and how long it will take.
TRACK integrates with several leading version control systems to track detailed information: MS SourceSafe, MKS Source Integrity, and Intersolv PVCS. It associates bugs with code changes, for instance, so you know which source-code files were modified to fix which bug. When you reopen a closed entry for reexamination, TRACK automatically retrieves appropriate versions of any associated files.
TRACK picks up where most version control and change management systems leave off in monitoring the development process and identifying patterns of weaknesses in the projects. This significantly shortens product development time and reduces defects in the product.
In addition, by recording exactly what happened during the development and testing of a project, TRACK substantially improves development forecasting. When you go into a planning session with hard statistics supplied by TRACK, it's far easier to accurately estimate how long future releases will require.
Track's SQL Interface Eliminates Size Limits
When you first try TRACK, you will be using its internal dBaseIV database. TRACK's database engine is fast and optimized, and can support well over 100 users in a LAN.
However, as your use of TRACK grows, you may want to interface with a SQL server, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle. Or perhaps you may already have a SQL server system, and you may need to interface with it to protect your financial investment in it.
TRACK makes interfacing with various SQL servers effortless. TRACK's growing number of SQL Server support makes it an increasingly robust system that will continue to support your needs beyond the year 2000.
Simple To Administer
For the system administrator, installing TRACK is easy and straight forward. Setting up server and clients takes minutes, and setting up the license is done by entering the license number. You can install upgrades on the server and simply download them to client systems via the network.
It is also simple to import and export selected data to or from external databases or to regularly merge and synchronize TRACK data from multiple sites.
TRACK's security, based on granting user group permissions, allows you to control who has access to specific data items, who can delete records, who can submit changes and who can add values to a choice list.
Finally, TRACK enables you to easily monitor who is working on a given project and to estimate when it will be completed. At any given time, you can monitor which users are actively logged in, and it is easy to examine how users have changed a record in the past by viewing the record change history.
These features provide TRACK administrators with precise information about all aspects of the project's current status in a relatively effortless manner.
