An insight into Bugs in the Software Applications

Abstract:

Bugs are there every where in the software applications. Almost every one who uses software applications for their day to day activities; do come across different kind of problems while working with them.  Each of these problems has different meanings to different people on it. There are many instances where in which, we (as end users of the system) do feel that how come they missed this bug, it's very important in this context (The context where in which the user operates).

Tester deals with Bugs every day and its good know about other people get affected with them. The list includes Customers, Stake Holders, Sales, Professional Services, Technical Support, Architecture & the Development team.

  

This is my second post in the Bug Life Cycle Series. Before going more into the Bugs and their life cycle, it's good to know, what it means to different people across the software application. Based on the contexts, the same bug might mean different things to different people. Do go through Role of Software Testing to understand my mission about Software Testing.

Wikipedia defines Software Bug as the following

A software bug (or "bug") is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect result). Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's source code or its design, and a few are caused by compilers producing incorrect code. A program that contains a large number of bugs, and/or bugs that seriously interfere with its functionality, is said to be buggy. Reports detailing bugs in a program are commonly known as bug reports, fault reports, problem reports, trouble reports, change requests, and so forth.

Tester Perspective

Any deviation from the expected results of the test case will be treated as a bug in the software application.

 

Customer Perspective

Customer uses the software application to solve his business needs. Any problem while modeling a solution to the business need will be considered as a bug in the software applications. These problems can be classified into two. They are the list of problems that they can live with and the other is the list of problems that need to be addressed to solve the business need.

The second list of problems will be sent to the vendors of the application for the fix. Some times, customer sends only the show stopper problems for his business. It's true in the fact that as an end user, I will contact the vendor only if the problem is critical for me.

 

 

Technical Support Perspective

The Support Team classifies (though it's critical) the customer requests into New Features, Enhancement, Bug, How to & Enquiries etc with respective severity levels. The decision will be taken by validating the problem with the features in the product.

 

Developer Perspective

The feature is designed this way and all the cases have passed. The end user might be using some other scenario. Yes, Some times there are bugs in my code. But it functions well if we use the way the application has built.

 

Management Perspective

Any problem with the application will be treated as Bug if it has impact over the revenue and customer satisfaction.

 

Final Thoughts

It's tough to have same perspective across all the people (might happen in an ideal world). The bug for some one may not be the bug for the other person. However there are some set of show stopper bugs for which, the perspective will be the same.