Tag: defects

Tips to write better Bug Reports

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

Writing defect reports is a constant part of a tester’s daily life, and an important one too! How you report the bugs you find plays a key role in the fate of the bug and whether it’s understood and resolved or ends up being deferred or rejected.

It is imperative for every tester to communicate the defects they find well. In my article published at TestRail blog, I discuss four simple tips to help you write better bug reports.

Study past bug reports

If you are new to your team or new to testing itself, the best way to learn about good bug reporting is to read the team’s past bug reports. Try to understand the bugs and see if you could reproduce them. 

By doing this exercise you learn the best way to present bugs so that the team can understand them. You’ll get a feel for the business language and the project’s jargon to be able to describe features and modules.You may also see some imperfections in the past reports, so you can think about how to improve them and what other information would be useful to include.

Create your own game plan

Create a shortcut for yourself, like writing down a summary or title of each bug you find as you go about testing and saving the screenshot. When you get down to reporting, you can quickly fill out the steps, as well as expected and actual results, and attach the saved screenshots. Doing this could be faster and save you the effort of repeating steps just to get the needed screenshots and logs. Continue Reading–>

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Four Goals of Testing Beyond Finding Defects

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

Are you testing with the sole purpose of finding defects? What if you don’t find any? Your testing should deliver more value than just finding bugs. In my article published at https://blog.gurock.com/, I examined the true goals of testing and how we can aim at achieving all four of them for the quality benefits of our software.

Gaining knowledge about defects 

While there is more to testing than pinpointing bugs, finding defects and problems is the first instinctive goal. Looking for places where the functionality breaks or does not work as expected is key. 

Testers can adopt a number of approaches, test techniques and strategies to find these problems before users do. This helps the team keep updated on the status of product quality, fix the problems, and improve the software for the users.

Proving functionality

If you have been testing diligently and going through a bunch of test cases and various scenarios but haven’t yet found a defect, it doesn’t mean it was all for nothing! If a test doesn’t fail, that means it passed, and that is useful information, too.

Another major goal of testing is to prove that the functionality works fine, and it is that proof that helps us make decisions about its future. Without this proof, we would never have a clear picture of the software’s quality, its intended functionality or whether it’s fit for use. Many teams would also get into problems with regulations, audits, and compliance without this proof of functionality.

Generating information

Testing also generates a lot more information than just passing or failing tests. Testers generally have loads of questions occur to them while testing. They may be about the need, implementation or design of the features, their related integrations with existing features, or actual usage scenarios. The answers to these questions are paramount in making the feature assimilate well within the software. 

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Components of a Defect Management Software

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

 Since software developers and testers work together in the Agile and DevOps environments, it gets challenging to cope up with the increasing competition. Development teams work in collaboration with various stakeholders to make the most of the testing efforts. Defects in software applications are a norm, the sooner you realize that better it is. It is impossible to have a 100% defect/error-free software application, but experts work to make the most of their efforts. The current need for faster delivery and quality products calls for robust software testing solutions that can meet customer expectations.

A defect management system is a defect repository where all the defects appearing in a system are identified, recorded and assigned for rectification. This system includes defect management software and defect management tools to achieve projects efficiently. 

How Does Defect Management Work?

A defect management system works in a systematic manner, and records all the defects in the system without duplicating defects, and maintaining a log for future use too. There are different steps involved in the defect management that are explained below–

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What can you learn from the defects you found?

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

The bugs we find during testing can tell us a lot about the application, the state of its quality and its release-readiness. Bugs can also provide insights into our development processes and practices — and lapses therein.

How can we study bugs to improve the overall state of our project? In my article published @Gurock TestRail blog, I have described three things to learn from the bugs you find. https://blog.gurock.com/three-learn-bugs/

 The location of defect clusters

Defect clustering is one of the seven principles of software testing, and keeping an eye out for these clusters is the responsibility of a good tester.

As we log defects into a tracking tool or portal, teams generally follow the practice of measuring relevant modules, components or functional areas against each defect. When tracked over time, this information can be real gold! It helps us track which areas of the application are having more bugs.

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Prevention is the Best Cure- for Defects in Agile

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

The agile methodology focuses on building in quality from the very beginning of the software lifecycle. That is why we aim to find and fix defects early on: A defect found and fixed in an earlier lifecycle phase is a multitude cheaper than the same defect at a later stage.

But how can we more easily make it possible to prevent defects from percolating deeper in the software development lifecycle by fixing them in their nascent stages?

This is the main theme of my latest article for @Gurock TestRail blog – where I explore and explain ways to foresee, analyze and thwart defects in an agile context.

The main points discussed are-

Communication

Conduct Reviews

Demonstrate Often

Static Analysis and CI

Click Here to read the complete article –>

Please support by liking / commenting and sharing the article!

Cheers

Nishi

The 12 Agile Principles: What We Hear vs. What They Actually Mean

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

The Agile Manifesto gives us 12 principles to abide by in order to implement agility in our processes. These principles are the golden rules to refer to when we’re looking for the right agile mindset. But are we getting the right meaning out of them?

In my latest article for Gurock TestRail blog, I examine what we mistakenly hear when we’re told the 12 principles, what pain points the agile team face due to these misunderstandings, and what each principle truly means.

 

Principle 1: Our Highest Priority is to Satisfy the Customer Through Early and Continuous Delivery of Valuable Software

What we hear: Let’s have frequent releases to show the customer our agility, and if they don’t like the product, we can redo it.

The team’s pain points: Planning frequent releases that aren’t thought out well increases repetitive testing, reduces quality and gives more chances for defect leakage.

What it really means: Agile requires us to focus on quick and continuous delivery of useful software to customers in order to accelerate their time to market.

Principle 2:

Check out the complete post here —- Click Here to Read more–>

 

Do share your stories and understanding of the 12 Agile Principles!

Cheers

Nishi

Optimize Your Hardening Sprint for a Quality Advantage

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

A hardening sprint is an additional sprint that some teams run to stabilize the code and ensure that everything is ready just before release. Agile teams vary in their opinions on using hardening sprints in Scrum, but if your team does agree on having one before your release, there may be a lot to be done and varied expectations from the product owner, testers and developers. It may also lead to other work being delayed, leading to accumulation of technical debt.

In my article for Gurock TestRail Blog, I have discussed some tips on optimising the hardening sprint and achieving the maximum quality before release.

I talk in detail about some main points to focus on–

  • Plan Ahead
  • Perform End-to-End Testing
  • Perform Non-Functional Testing
  • Perform Tests on Other Platforms and Languages
  • Reduce Lower Priority Defect Counts
  • Use your sprint Wisely

Read the full article here — > https://blog.gurock.com/optimize-hardening-sprint/

Please share your thoughts!

Happy Testing!

Nishi

Pesticide Paradox in Software Testing

Nishi Grover Garg2 Comments

Pests and Bugs sound alike?? They act alike too!! 

Boris Beizer, in his book Software Testing Techniques (1990) coined the term pesticide paradox to describe the phenomenon that the more you test software, the more immune it becomes to your tests.

Just like, if you keep applying the same pesticide, the insects eventually build up resistance and the pesticide no longer works. Software undergoing the same repetitive tests build resistance to them, and they fail to catch more defects after that.

  • Software undergoing the same repetitive tests eventually builds up resistance to them.
  • As you run your tests multiple times, they stop being effective in catching bugs.
  • Moreover, part of the new defects introduced into the system will not be caught by your existing tests and will be released onto the field.

Solution: Refurnish and Revise Test Materials regularly

In order to overcome the pesticide paradox, testers must regularly develop newer tests exercising the various parts of the system and their inter-connections to find additional defects.

Also, testers cannot forever rely on existing test techniques or methods and must be on the look out to continually improve upon existing methods to make testing more effective.

It is suggested to keep revisiting the test cases regularly and revising them. Though agile teams provide little spare time for such activities, but the testing team is bound to keep planning these exercises within the team in order to keep the best performance coming. A few ideas to achieve this:

  • Brainstorming sessions – to think of more ideas around the same component testing
  • Buddy Reviews – New joinees to the team are encouraged to give their fresh perspective to the existing test scenarios for the product, which might get some new cases added.
  • Strike out older tests on functionalities that are changed / removed
  • Build new tests from scratch if a major change is made in a component – to open a fresh perspective

 

UPDATE–

This article has been recommended and used as a reference by HANNES LINDBLOM in his blog at https://konsultbolag1.se/bloggen/veckans-testartips-15-tur-genom-variation