Some systems will e-mail interested parties, such as the submitter and assigned programmers, when new records are added or the status changes.
The main benefit of a bug-tracking system is to provide a clear centralized overview of development requests (including both bugs and improvements; the boundary is often fuzzy), and their state.
The prioritized list of pending items (often called backlog) provides valuable input when defining the product road map, or maybe just "the next release".
In a corporate environment, a bug-tracking system may be used to generate reports on the productivity of programmers at fixing bugs.
A local bug tracker (LBT) is usually a computer program used by a team of application support professionals (often a help desk) to keep track of issues communicated to software developers.
Recently, commercial bug tracking systems have also begun to integrate with distributed version control.
While traditional test management tools such as HP Quality Center and IBM Rational Quality Manager come with their own bug tracking systems, other tools integrate with popular bug tracking systems.