Maintaining Improvement: The GP Bugzilla

GP Bugzilla

The Open Source model has an important lesson to teach on quality which answers a major problem in General Practice software.

The Mozilla project which arose around the release of Netscape's source code for their browser developed Bugzilla - a bug and issue handling system for colaborative development.

In a commercial environment the usefulness of bugzilla is that it ensures bugs that are identified by one user are seen by anyone else who cares to look at them, and thus bland assurances that action is being taken, or a suggestion that nobody else has been troubled by a bug, or just plain doing nothing at all about it are rendered less likely responses by companies.

In open source projects publishing a bug report commonly causes someone to look at the source code, identify the problem, fix it and publish the result for review and incorporation into the main code tree. But we move toward that only in small steps and using the Bugzilla for GP systems set up by Dr Simon Child is one of those steps..