Skip to main content

How and when to raise a defect?

Many times when testing, especially in Agile, it's important to communicate with the team any issues be it environmental or code related. A common misconception of Agile is that it's best to not document anything and get things done as efficiently as possible, often this means cutting back on the amount of documentation that is written. 

Whilst I agree that too much documentation is a bad thing, every project needs some form of documentation, be it hand over documents, a wiki on what it is that's been developed and how it works or even a set of Given When Thens (More on this in a future post! - In the meantime look here) of the new functionality, this all helps with future teams being able to look at and read and will hopefully help any future development around the areas. I am however, all too aware, that far too often people send round documents, that 95% of the time don't get read, and just get forgotten about. So it's definitely important to strike the right balance.

This, I believe can also be applied to raising defects. Often when I notice there is an issue with something I am testing, I will investigate the cause of the issue myself, and try and figure out why it's occurring, I do a Defect Dance. Any information that I can add to the defect will help the developers identify and fix the issue (see What to log in a bug).

Often when I am about to raise a defect and after investigating I will speak to a dev and go through the issues and my findings,  from here I will ask if it is worth raising the bug or if it's a quick fix then get them to fix it quickly and move on. It's important to take the right tone when raising a bug with a developer, as for some reason they can be protective over their code! There isn't any point in swearing at them, or even playing a blame game, the bug will be fixed a whole lot quicker if you help them by supplying all necessary information. 

I feel that all too often, people blindly raise bugs, regardless if there is already a bug raised, or if it's a production issue or even when a quick discussion with a developer and they can fix it there and then, it saves time of the tester, saves time of the developer and I believe it helps the team work more closely together. Obviously, if teams are offshore then this isn't really viable, and defect tracking tools are needed... That however, is a whole different story! (I'm sure I will post a blog post or two about that!)

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Testers: Be more like a Super-Villain!

Who doesn't love a Super Hero? Talk to my son, and he'll tell you how much he loves them, talk to many adults and they'll say the same! Deep down, we all love to be the Super Hero, we all want to save the day! However, I want to talk about the flip side of Super Heroes, the Super Villains... I often play Imaginext with my son, and I (unfortunately?) am nearly always the Super Villain! Be it Lex Luthor, Joker, Two Face, Mr Freeze or The Riddler! These are all great characters and great Super Villains, but why would I want to write about Super Villains? A while ago where I worked, we had a few Super Heroes, people who would be able to come in and "fix" things that had broken and help deliver projects on time. We then shifted, we decided to do away with the Super Hero culture and try and prevent from being in that position in the first place, whilst we didn't go as far as wanting to hire Super Villains, it's definitely a story that has stuck with me and t...
2 comments
Read more

Treating Test Code as Production Code

It's important when writing automated tests to remember that the code you write should be up to production standards, meaning any conventions that you have in place should be adhered to and that it should follow good design patterns. Too many people often say why does it have to be as good as production code, it's "Only" a test, so long as it passes then that's fine... To answer this we need to look at why we want our tests to be written in such a structured and efficient manner: - Maintainability - by making the test code structured and efficient, it becomes far easier to maintain and in doing so changes in the future can happen quickly as the test isn't linked to anything that it shouldn't be and it's easy to understand for a new set of eyes. - Durability - Again by making the tests structured they should be resistant to changes, if you change a variable name for instance then it shouldn't effect the unit test unless it absolutely has to....
1 comment
Read more

Tech Develops - A day dedicated to YOU!

Working in Tech, it can be difficult to find the time to further improve yourself, you're focused a lot on delivery, and it can be hard to drag yourself away from it and spend time on delivering an improved you. This is why some companies are starting to have time dedicated to your personal development, where people drop tools and do a personal project or watch some tutorials. Luckily working at ASOS we get the last Friday of every month to focus on this! Last Friday we held what we call a "Tech Develops" day, where as an employee of ASOS and working in Technology, In the week running up to it we decided it would be a good idea to have a platform where people could stand up and perform a 99 Second Talk about anything they please. We had 12 people sign up to it, and we had talks ranging from the technical (Git-Bisect) to a Conference review (UKStar). The first talk was an informative talk about Git Bisect and how it's used and why because of it, it's import...
3 comments
Read more