Introducing BugCatcher

Hi, I’m Jon and I think the way that we QA websites is broken.

When I’m reviewing the work that’s been done on a website or app and I come across a bug, the typical reporting process looks something like this:

• Find a bug on the website.
• (Maybe) take a screenshot.
• Go to whichever project management tool we’re using for this project.
• Create a ticket, typing up as much details as possible.
• Go back to the website and continue looking for bugs.

The advantage that I have in this situation is that I’ve spent the vast majority of my career as a front-end developer, so I generally have a pretty good idea of the details that need to be included in a bug report to point another engineer in the right direction.

As the recipient of many such tickets from product managers, project managers, client stakeholders, and QA teams, I’ve often found that process to end up looking something like the following:

• Get a ticket assigned in project management tool of choice.
• Realize there’s too little information to determine what the actual issue is.
• Reach out the reporter and go back-and-forth a bit to get the relevant details.
• Find and fix the issue.

Or worse, when faced with the overwhelming annoyance of “the process”, people just start reporting bugs via direct messages in Slack.

gasp

While there has been a ton of innovation in the design tools space over the last few years — with Figma, Framer, InVision, and others — the reality is that the communication and collaboration workflow during the frontend QA process has been left behind.

Introducing BugCatcher

BugCatcher is a tool to seamlessly integrate the bug reporting process with your existing project management tools, while automatically generating everything an engineer may need to know to resolve the bug being reported.

Embed the BugCatcher script on your site, connect your project to your existing tools, and begin reporting bugs directly from your site — without ever having to leave your site.

Along with a few other helpful data breadcrumbs, each bug that you report will include:

• Browser details (vendor and version)
• Browser dimensions
• Screen dimensions
• A screenshot of the page being reported
• The URL where the bug was found

This is where most other similar tools would stop.

What makes BugCatcher different is that for each project, you can configure a set of custom triggers to send bug reports to any number of external systems based on the contents of that ticket.

For example, if a ticket is marked as “normal” severity, it can be logged directly in GitHub. But if a ticket is marked as “critical”, it can be logged in GitHub and also generate an email or a PagerDuty incident.

Not another project management tool

No one wants another place to track tickets and feedback. Whether you love or hate your current project management tool, the financial and cognitive costs of switching to new tools can be insurmountable for many (most?) teams.

Most project management software is not built to extend beyond its own bounds, though, so you’re left to jump between applications to find issues in one and report them in another.

It’s a drain on productivity.

The process is broken.

BugCatcher aims to remove the friction and interruptions in your frontend QA process, while keeping all of the things you love — or just can’t afford to get away from — about your existing tools.