How not to miss the last bug?
After product release, users find a serious bug despite much time and effort spent on coding and testing. How and why does this happen? Now we are going to find out the most common reasons why bugs are omitted.
No doubts that because of human nature a number of system issues are possible. Nothing and nobody is perfect. The matter is that we all suffer from so-called tunnel thinking or cognitive tunneling. That means in particular situations, usually in stressful ones, we stay focused on one particular aspect or notion without seeing the whole picture. And because of this, obvious bugs can be missed.
Nevertheless, there are many other factors that are not connected with human nature and that prevent to the detection of bugs.
Pesticide Paradox
Boris Beizer suggested the idea of the Pesticide Paradox: “Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffectual.” To avoid this paradox, testers should monitor the product modifications and updated tests. You cannot reuse the same test scenarios to check various products or their different versions.
Time limitations
Coming deadline and a large scope of work are the tester’s nightmare. It is very difficult to stay attentive in such chaos. Rushed testing causes many troubles and leads to higher expenses – severe bugs are omitted and their fixing after the release will cost more. The product team as well as the test one has to wisely plan time and schedule tasks in order not to miss serious software errors.
Test strategy
Sometimes testing team may apply the wrong checking strategy because of different reasons, for example, lack of experience. The specialists try to select the most bug-triggering scenarios and combinations of devices, OS versions, browsers, etc. They should imitate common user behavior and try to predict some unusual actions. Also, the lack of documentation and requirements makes it more complicated to select a proper test strategy.
Unfixed bugs
Even if a bug is detected and reported, it does not necessarily mean that it will be fixed. Some tickets may be simply forgotten or lost in the backlog. Testers should monitor that all found errors are removed.
To miss a serious bug after the product release is very frustrating for the testing team. And we should not blame only QA and testers because of missed bugs. The product of high quality with minimum bugs is the result of strong collaboration between all members of the project team.
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