Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Ten Tips for effective bug tracking

1.Remember that the only person who can close a bug is the person who findout first.Anyone can resolve it,but only the person who saw the bug can really be sure that when they saw is fixed.

2.A good tester will always try to reduce the reproduction steps to the minimal steps to reproduce.this is extremely helpful for the programmer who has to find the bug.

3.There are many ways to resolve a bug. Developer can resolve a bug as fixed,wont fix,postponed,not pro,duplicate or by design

4.You will want to keep careful track of versions. Every build of the sofware that you give to testers should have a build ID Number so that the poor tester doesnt have to retest the bug on a version of the software where it wasnot even supposed to be fixed.

5.Not reproduce means that nobody could ever reproduce the bug. Programmers often use this when the bug report is missing the reproduce steps.

6.If yoy are a programmer and you are having trouble getting testers to use the bug database, just dont accept bug reports by any other method. If your testers are used to sending you email with bug reports, just bounce the emails back to them with a brief message: “ please put this in the bug database. I cant keep track of emails.

7.If you are a tester, and you are having trouble getting programmers to use the bug database, just dont tell them about bugs – put them in the database and let the database email them.

8.If your are a programmer, and only some of your colleagues use the bug database, just start assigning them bugs in the database. Eventually they will get the hint.

9.If you are a manager, and nobody seems to be using the bug database that you installed at great expense, start assigning new features to people using bug. A bug database is alos a great “unimplemented feature” database, too.

10.Avoid the temptation to add new fields to the bug database.Every month or so, somebody will come up with a great idea for a new field to put in the database. You get all kinds of clever ideas, for example, keeping track of file where the bug was found; keeping track of what % of the time the bug is reproducible; keeping track of how many times the bug occured ; keeping track of which exact versions of which DLLs were installed on the machine where the bug happend. Its very important not to give in to these ideas. If you do , your new bug entry screen will end up with a thousand fields that you need to supply, and nobody will want to input bug reports any more. For the bug database to work, everybody needs to use it, and if entering bugs “formally” is too mush work, people will go around the bug database.

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