7 Tips Our Quality Assurance Professionals Follow to Report Bugs Without Developers Hating Us
It is obvious that nobody appreciates having their mistakes pointed out, but truth be told– this is what Quality Assurance specialists aka testers do on a daily basis. Developers often treat their apps and their code on a very personal level, in a similar way that painters consider their paintings or musicians, their riffs.
So, how do our Quality Assurance Professionals deal with developers, especially when they need to report a bug, and how do they avoid getting into possible conflicts?
1. We always ensure it’s a bug
Nobody likes to be in a situation like when there is this one person who claims that the team has done something wrong but, in reality, they didn’t; now the team needs to waste time to prove themselves right and show that nothing had in fact gone wrong.
No one wants to be that guy and specifically doesn’t want to transform permanently into this person. In order for us to be sure, we always try reproducing the bug we’ve just found. We evaluate it on other operating systems, devices, web browsers, or anything that can help us in being completely sure that the thing we’ve encountered is indeed a bug.
2. We avoid being the bad guy at all cost
Sometimes we get so excited upon finding a bug that we completely forget or ignore to check if we did everything correctly.
Scenario 1:
Tester – “Oh My God – Look, location sharing isn’t working!”
Coder – “Of course it isn’t, you didn’t give permission to the app to use your location!”
Scenario 2:
Tester – “I can’t log in!”
Coder – “Obviously not, the password was too short!”
Scenario 3:
Tester – “Hey I reported this bug two weeks ago and it’s still here!”
Coder – “Of course it is, you’ve downloaded the older version.”
We ensure that we avoid getting into such situations.
3. We are always specific
It is important to be specific. This situation is similar to a scenario where a friend has met with an accident and we’re calling an ambulance – the more information we provide, the better help our friend will get.
Likewise, we report the build version, environment, web browser, OS version and type of device – these are necessary. We give it a clever and unique title, so that even a stranger could easily understand what is going on (we try keeping it short and sweet).
4. We become the navigator
Once we have learnt how to reproduce a bug, we try not to hide it. It’s no top secret knowledge! We explain to the developers how to find the bug and, we also explore if there are other ways to reach it. If yes, we include every single one of them. We become the coder’s navigator, we never know where they might find a solution.
Another crucial thing to mention is that we ensure that the preconditions that have to be met to find the bug are met. For instance, if we must be logged in, then to which account – standard, premium, or something else? or, if we happen to find a bug in a search module, was the search filtered or not? etc. This is all highly crucial information.
5. It’s best that we show it
If we happen to find a bug that has a pretty complex path, we record it step by step, instead of writing down 16 points with directions. We even try using both methods just to make sure that the explanation is clear, so that no one is forced to reach us to simply understand what the heck we actually had in mind while reporting this particular bug.
6. We have an explanation on how it should be fixed
Once we’ve checked and made sure that we’ve found a bug, we try to explain how it should be corrected.
We do our best to avoid giving vague information like ‘the background colour on the settings screen is wrong.’ We avoid making the developer go hunting to look for the proper one in the specifications that have been sent by the client months ago. We ensure that they fix bugs much much faster by giving them all the required information.
7. We are at our gentle best
As mentioned at the start – nobody appreciates having their mistakes pointed out, so we believe that it is important for us that we avoid being unnecessarily critical. We strongly believe that we are not censors, teachers or judges and we do not assess – we only help in ensuring quality.
Developing an application can be a complex process that needs a lot of planning and focus. It is unreal to avoid mistakes (sometimes stupid, sometimes petty), bugs and crashes. We ensure that we do not report bugs with a sense of pride, and try to avoid using expressions such as “no surprise” “ofcourse” or “again” when telling people that something isn’t working as it should be.
The most important thing that we bear in our mind is that we are a team and are working towards the same goal. There is no space or time for us to look down on anyone in the team, and we ensure that we have fun working together.
To Wrap Up
We believe that following all the above steps have helped us become better Quality Assurance Professionals. These rules we follow are short, specific, sweet and gentle, and have improved the work ethic of everyone in our team, allowing us all to produce better applications and software.
Legacit is an innovative Mobile App Development Company that provides expertise and consultation in the area of Application Development, Quality Assurance & Testing, and Cloud services, to name a few. We pride ourselves in being steps ahead of the competition in making use of up-to-date technology, empowering our projects in achieving high customer satisfaction by providing quality that is unparalleled.
If you are in search of Quality Assurance Professionals to help you in testing and maintaining the quality of the software you are developing, please feel free to call on the number 0484 4348888 to initiate a conversation with our experts. You can be assured that our experts have spent decades in this space!