What kind of information should I put in an artifact?

A project created in Project Tracker is a collection of instances of various artifact types. An artifact type can be a Defect, a Request for Enhancement, or any other basic element of a project.

It is sometimes useful to think of an artifact as an instance of an artifact type. When you create a new instance of an artifact type -- for example, a new Defect report -- you supply information that your domain administrator and project owner have determined are important for that artifact type, such as a description and the name of the customer who reported the defect.

Each piece of information that you enter in an artifact is known as an attribute. Attributes are characteristics of artifacts. For example, when you enter a new Defect, a Description may be one attribute of the Defect report and the Customer Name may be another attribute. Attributes may be used to check the database for duplicates.

When entering an artifact instance, keep in mind that the quality of the information that you enter is vital to a project's success. For example, the following may be appropriate guidelines for entering Defects:

1. Reproducible - Artifacts that cannot be duplicated should be marked invalid.
2. Specific - The more details you provide the easier it is for the engineer to identify the problem and solution.
3. Sequenced - Provide the steps to reproduce the problem. If other people cannot reproduce the problem, it may be marked as invalid or it may not be documented correctly.
4. Identify actual versus desired outcomes - Be clear as to "what happened" versus "what should have happened".

Inappropriate example of a defect description:

"My browser crashed. I think I was on example.com. My computer uses Windows. I think that this is a really bad problem and you should fix it now. By the way, I don't like the icons. Nobody will use your software if you keep those ugly icons. Oh, and my grandmother's home page does not look right, either, it's all messed up. Good luck."

More appropriate example of a defect description:

"The system crashes when using an image link with the border=0 attribute. Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to example.com, using the 10.28.99 build on a Win NT 4.0 (Service Pack 5) system.

   The system crashes.

2. When I reboot into Linux and reproduce this problem using the 10.28.99 Linux build (IssueEntryP9), it again crashes each time upon drawing the banner at the top of the page.

Expected result: the system should not crash.

Obtained result: the system crashed.

Workaround: The system no longer crashes when I edit the index.html page and remove "border=0" attribute from the following image link:

<img src="http://example.com/images/topics/topicfoos.gif" width=34 height=44 border=0 alt="News"> "