It should be a given that the same bug can cause different apparent problems to different users. It is also possible that a single reported problem may be traceable of multiple different faults.

'''Therefore,'''

Several reported failures that arise out of the same fault should be tracked together. Consider splitting a single bug with multiple causes into a bug for each fault, and relate them as above.

'''But,'''

The bug tracking software must support the ability to associate bugs as duplicates of and dependent on other bugs. Splitting a single bug or otherwise tracking related bugs without good support from the tool requires too much manual overhead.

''Do we have two entities here?  When I worked at a BigCompany, our tracking software had separate record types for bug reports and the underlying issues that caused them.  Just a suggestion.''

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DefectTrackingPatterns
CategoryBug