Non Reproducible Bugs – How to deal with them ?

Last week, i had reviewed the bug reports submitted by my team & found that some of them are not reproducible. I am curious about where things went wrong & checked with the team.

Some of the Responses:

• Look Venkat, this bug is not-producible always. So we have captured the log.

• It does occur if we re-start the application

• It takes good amount of time for the investigation

As a Tester, i have come across of situations where some bugs won't reproducible again and i infer that many of the testers might have gone through the same episode atleast once.

But then, Non-Reproducible Bugs are errors of the testers even though we may not agree. More over this is true for Technical Support & Testing functions.

It's tough for the Developers to work with such bugs and testers used to get lot of objections over such bugs. If the count is more, then it might spoil the relationships between testers and developers.

An Insight

I infer from my experiences that systems doesn't have the powers of human brain. It's tough to repeat the same mistake again from people since they are conscious. Systems doesn't have that much capability interms of thinking and they do perform the sequence in which they have coded for. 

How do deal with Non Producible Issues

Testers need to improve their skills inorder to reproduce such issues. The following might be a help.

• Try to capture the story around the issue and not just steps.

• Capture the complete Test Enviroment

• Capture all the available Test Execution Results. This includes your test data, screen shots, applications logs, system logs, server logs

• Need more patience (they won't occur easily)

• Need more observation skills on the application behavior under test.

• Narrate the story around the issue to the stake holders and to corner the issue.

• Resources & Time Contraints might be an issue (More true for Tech Support). Bargain for the same

Conclusion

They are bound to take lot of time & resources in the process. It's suggested to reproduce each & every issue. We must explore more for the critical issues & re-produce them asap. In the process, we learn more too.  

Happy Testing.