Defect documentation and tracking companies QASymphony and Fog Creek have teamed up to integrate the technology driving their qTrace Quality Assurance tool and FogBugz defect-tracking system.

QASymphony's qTrace works to document defects by recording all steps, screens, and system information associated with a defect. FogBugz tracks bugs, issues, and customer support tickets as it manages projects with scheduling and project management features — it also provides customer support features such as email routing and discussion groups.

In line with the integration of the two companies' tools, QASymphony also announced version 2.5 of qTrace, which now adds four different single screen capture modes. The concept is that this eliminates the need for the "PrintScreen button" in Windows platform environments, or indeed the use of any other screen capture software.

QASymphony says that qTrace has created a "new category of screen capture"; i.e., qTrace not only captures images of software screens, but also the user's actions such as mouse clicks and entered text. By leveraging the screen images and generated text narration, a tester can describe and submit software defects in full detail quickly and easily.

"Our goal is to make qTrace the only screen capture tool needed by testers," says Vu Lam, CEO of QASymphony. "We've tackled the tough part, which is creating a tool with the intelligence to document long complex defects. But we've heard our users say that for simple cases, one screenshot is enough. We've now tuned qTrace to have robust functions in the capture of a single screenshot, so qTrace is the only tool needed to document simple and complex defects. We're also adding some other goodies that I'm sure our fans will appreciate!"