Often times developers only think about tracking the bugs in the code for their "real jobs" and don't worry about issues that might pop up in their personal projects. Brandon Savage suggests that they should both be important and that not tracking bugs on your personal projects can be a bad thing for the quality of your code.

Too often, it seems like these development practices are abandoned, especially with regards to the use of a bug tracker. I know I have personally been guilty of failing to use a bug tracker, even though I use things like Subversion and develop specifications. It's easy to forget, but important to remember.

He lists five reasons why you should use a bug tracker for your personal development:

• Our minds are imperfect repositories of information.
• Bad development practices can form.
• It makes it harder to force ourselves to use bug trackers for private paying clients.
• Predicting time to completion becomes more difficult.
• Seeing progress being made is that much more difficult.