As a tester, it takes immense effort to have an eye for detail and find a defect that can be a showstopper for the product. The first thing most Testers do is to immediately jump with excitement and then notify the developer about the defect and even show it to him/her on the QA environment wherever it was found. Once this is done, a Tester should not think that his/her job is over. It is very important to file every defect found during Testing Cycle whether the defect is consistently reproducible or not. There are several benefits that come with this:
1. Defect Filing is the only tracking mechanism for QA teams unless the organization is following a different tracking mechanism (This is irrespective of the Defect Reporting tool being used).
2. The Development team can never question the credibility of the QA team that a particular defect was not raised or even missed during the Testing Cycle. Even if QA finds a million defects, yet miss one defect, it’s a black mark though we as humans do err. And why not, that one defect missed could be wreaking havoc to the product beyond imagination.
3. Defect Reports describe the overall health of the product over a period of time. As the product release time gets closer, it is the total number of the open issues that will decide if the product needs to be shipped as is or fix some more issues.
4. If the first version of the product has already gone out to the customer and the organization is planning on the next version release, the most immediate task would be to take a look at all the backlog defects that are open or even filed as Feature Enhancement Requests and get most of them fixed if not all.
5. Defect Bifurcation based on Module/Component of the product gets easier if all the defects found are filed and tracked effectively. For e.g. as in Step 4 above, If the tester drew a graph of all the defects against each of the components, he/she would easily identify the most buggy module/component and focus more on the same in subsequent test cycles. It is also very valuable information for the Development team to work on.
These were some benefits that were on the top of my mind. If you have many more, please feel free to share with me.
Next time you come across a defect in the product - do file it without fail!
Happy Defect Reporting,
Regards,
Pari
Parimala,
ReplyDeleteAll the benifits mentioned by you are valid and obviuos reasons as to why we should go for logging (filing)a defect.
But , I am unable to understand the significance of this post. Have you come across any organization which does not use tools to log defects OR have you come across any tester who tells the issue verbally to the developers and does not log it properly ?
In some projects of mine we didn't use bug tracking tool as the project was not supposed to be initiated in the tracking tool but then we used excel templates and list the issues in the email to track it...
Amit
Thanks a lot for this Post, Really, wonderful and this my favorite Post. By this Post, i have learnt "Tester task will get over when the bug is not reproducible."
ReplyDelete