​How to Use CloudApp to Optimize Your Bug Tracking Process

This article was sponsored by CloudApp. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Fast, agile, flexible software development is vital to any modern business — you need to get your products built, tested, launched, and sold — ASAP. Optimizing your development, review, and testing processes makes a huge difference to your speed to market and competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, software bugs and development errors are a way of life — they are unexpected by their very nature. Optimizing for fixing software bugs can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. One easy way to make your bug fixing process smoother and more efficient is to use a cloud based service called CloudApp.

CloudApp — What it is and What it Does

CloudApp is a tool that allows you to easily create, annotate, and share screenshots, GIFs, and screen recordings with others. It works as follows:

1. You identify something you need to share visually with others.
2. You capture the image in the most appropriate way — as a static screenshot, a short GIF, or an extended screen recording. These are known in CloudApp as “drops.”
3. You annotate the image with text, arrows, emojis, lines, and other shapes to add context and information.
4. You upload the image and annotation to CloudApp’s service and get a link to the image.
5. You send/share the link to others — they can then access and review the information, make comments, and act on it.

CloudApp — Other Features

CloudApp has several other useful features:

• Drag, drop, organize and work with many different file types including large files, documents, code snippets, audio, zip archives, and more.
• Search by image, color, and other visual attributes to quickly locate specific image files.
• Share securely and control who has access to image files.
• Integration with Trello (productivity tool), JIRA (bug tracking and development), Slack (communications), and ZenDesk (customer support).
• Capture from browser tabs (for SaaS products) or native Windows and Mac software.
• Works across multiple environments — staging, development, testing, production, and more.

Benefits of Using CloudApp in Software Development

As you can imagine, the ability to capture and record from a screen makes bug capturing and reporting much easier.

• Capture bugs directly from within the app, as they occur.
• Record exactly what process needs to happen to recreate the bug.
• Capture error messages or other visual artifacts created by the bug.
• Add annotations including text and other shapes to highlight the bug and its impact.
• Share images with other developers to allow team-wide efforts to identify and resolve bugs.
• Work with developers at remote locations and different time zones.
• Speed up identification and fixing of bugs.
• Compare screens and recordings before, during, and after the bug fix.
• Give access to testers and reviewers to help them capture bugs during various test cases.
• Don’t just rely on verbal or text descriptions of bugs and their impact.

CloudApp estimates that bug fixes can be up to three times faster when using CloudApp in parallel with a tool like JIRA or Trello.

A Process Flow for Identifying and Fixing Bugs with CloudApp

Here’s how an efficient bug identification, review, and fix process might work using CloudApp with its Trello or JIRA integrations.

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by Paul Maplesden via SitePoint