An Excuse for a tester to miss bugs
Submitted by Ainars Galvans on Wed, 08/10/2008 - 11:47.
general software testing
Recenty had an interesting conversation with a project manager.
Me: I keep wondering why some testers use absence or requirments as excuse for missing a lot of bugs
PM: Endeed. I would instead accept very detailed requirements as an excuse if you need to validate it all. When you don’t have requirments you have all your time to hunt the bugs down!
Endeed if you have specificants on thousands of pages and need to validate each and every line – it take a lot of your time and especially your mental power to do so. Not to mention inattentianal blindeness that will take pace for sure.
Besides you could also misinterpret specifications you have and interprete a wrong behaviour of an application as a correct one. You may test agains outdated specifications.
Although I’m afraid my reports could use it agains me I’m going to reveal what at least few excuses I am ready to accept for bugs missed in testing:
- Lack of domain (terminology) knowledge cause requirment misinterpretation of the behaviour described in the bug as correct one. i.e. run the test but wrong oracle
- Priorities (as defined or at least reviewed and accepted by management) made executing the test specified in a particular defect impossible within given timeframe. i.e. missed to run the test because was owerhelmed with other tasks
- This is a regression bug which we did not discovered because failed to imagine that the certain feature may have an imact. i.e. when we last run it the problem was not there
- Problem is not always repeatable. We tested case close to one described in a bug, but not close enough.
Of course this is not full list, just a few examples. And well, few more examples beside „there are no requirments” examples ofexcuses that makes me a very suspicious (well this is just a polite way to say that I hate to hear them):
- Developers gives as too buggy code, too late.
- We didn’t have enough time
- We don’t know business domain (meaning – so we missed to run certain tests)
- Developers does not cooperate
- Developers don’t fix the bugs we report anyway. Cancel a lot of them
Me: I keep wondering why some testers use absence or requirments as excuse for missing a lot of bugs
PM: Endeed. I would instead accept very detailed requirements as an excuse if you need to validate it all. When you don’t have requirments you have all your time to hunt the bugs down!
Endeed if you have specificants on thousands of pages and need to validate each and every line – it take a lot of your time and especially your mental power to do so. Not to mention inattentianal blindeness that will take pace for sure.
Besides you could also misinterpret specifications you have and interprete a wrong behaviour of an application as a correct one. You may test agains outdated specifications.
Although I’m afraid my reports could use it agains me I’m going to reveal what at least few excuses I am ready to accept for bugs missed in testing:
- Lack of domain (terminology) knowledge cause requirment misinterpretation of the behaviour described in the bug as correct one. i.e. run the test but wrong oracle
- Priorities (as defined or at least reviewed and accepted by management) made executing the test specified in a particular defect impossible within given timeframe. i.e. missed to run the test because was owerhelmed with other tasks
- This is a regression bug which we did not discovered because failed to imagine that the certain feature may have an imact. i.e. when we last run it the problem was not there
- Problem is not always repeatable. We tested case close to one described in a bug, but not close enough.
Of course this is not full list, just a few examples. And well, few more examples beside „there are no requirments” examples ofexcuses that makes me a very suspicious (well this is just a polite way to say that I hate to hear them):
- Developers gives as too buggy code, too late.
- We didn’t have enough time
- We don’t know business domain (meaning – so we missed to run certain tests)
- Developers does not cooperate
- Developers don’t fix the bugs we report anyway. Cancel a lot of them