Bug Advocacy:
This is an interesting part of the forum as every now and then we need to fight for each and every bug of ours to prove that the bug really is a bug or the bug really needs to be fixed as it is impacting the application. In the course, we often hear following comments from the programmers / give such comments to programmers:
Scenario 1: "Works for me. So what goes wrong?" – Developers often say that the bugs are not reproducible. They say that this is working fine at their system. In such a case a tester needs to patiently hear and see what exactly the developer means by his statements. He needs to find out where the difference of opinions and understanding lies. It is not always that we have understood the system right. It is quite possible that what we say is wrong and can be rightly done by them.
Scenario 2: “So then I tried . . ." - It is often seen, that with the due pressure on the tester, in the course of finding and reporting bugs, he forgets that the tests need to be performed on the stable condition of the application whereby the application shows a consistent behavior. A tester enter a phone number as special characters – impact of saving this can be a crash or overflow error…even without checking this he also enters the name as 150 characters and save them altogether – again this data can also give some error. Sometimes, the system gives some error and over that we continue to work further on the system until it crashes – then we report a bug. So, in such a case further actions worsens the problem.
Scenario 3: "That's funny, it did it a moment ago." - There are circumstances when programs that fail once a week, or fail once in a blue moon, or never fail when you try them in front of the programmer but always fail when you have a deadline coming up. So, it is important to keep snapshots, test data, databases trace, xml traces, etc for that matter.
Scenario 4: “And then it went wrong” – When the tester himself is not clear about the steps he has performed or the data he has entered and approximately reports down the bug – certainly the bug might get irreproducible. This can lead us and system nowhere or in sea of problems – we can neither close the bug nor can we describe the bug and worst even the tester cannot reproduce the bug or fight for the cause of the bug!