We need to follow a slightly different work flow for fixing a bug. Bugs—or defects in Trac terminology—should always start with a ticket, even if it is one of the developers who discovers it. New bugs should be processed on a regular basis—an activity commonly referred to as triage—with the frequency being anything from the moment each bug is reported to hourly, daily, or even weekly but we should not have a processing cycle longer than that. This process aims to answer a few immediate questions:
Has it been reported before?
Is the report valid?
Is it reproducible?
How severe is it?
Different projects may have different questions, but if we can answer these then we have a good start. The benefit of asking the first question is obvious: if a ticket for a similar bug already exists we can resolve this one as a duplicate within Trac and move on. We should remember, though, to add a comment saying which ticket this is a duplicate of. If this is genuinely a new bug then we need to establish...