Software bugs are a fact of life. The bad news is that finding and fixing software bugs takes up a significant portion of your software development time. In this article, we’ll show you how to get better at spotting them and how to develop more effective bug-tracking practices.
A defect is a deviation from a specified requirement or specification.
In the context of software development, a bug is an error, flaw, failure or fault in a computer program that causes it to behave unexpectedly or not function as intended. A defect may also be called an anomaly, fault, failure or bug depending on context.
The process of fixing a defect is called debugging and consists of testing to find the cause of the bug and correcting it.
A defect life cycle is the path that a defect follows from its inception to resolution. It starts with the initial discovery of a problem, continues through all levels of investigation and decision-making, and finally ends with closure or abandonment.
In the Defect Life Cycle, this is the first state of a defect. When a new flaw is discovered, it is classified as 'New,' and validations and testing are done on it later in the Defect Life Cycle.
During the development phase, a product defect is collected and assigned to the team responsible. The development manager or project lead assigns each developer as they see fit.
Any time a developer flags an issue in the new application, they must immediately start addressing it. The status of a bug is always evaluated based on the impact on overall functionality of the app. If the defect poses more harm to the user experience than other bugs, the status will be changed accordingly with respect to severity. In case, the defect has no impact on overall performance and could be cleared without much hassle then it may be waived from any further analysis.
Once the developer finishes the task of making the required changes to fix a defect, they can mark their progress in the project management system by changing its status from “In Progress” to “Fixed.”
Upon fixing a defect, the developer assigns the defect back to testers who will be responsible for retesting the defect and therefore marking it as fixed once all possible defects have been eliminated.
When testers have successfully validated the fix of a bug, they proceed to retest it to confirm that the solution works as expected.
If any issue persists in the defect, then it will be assigned to the developer again. And if after fixing the bug it works, and if again found in another testing it is marked as ‘Reopen’.
When a technical issue has been handled, the quality analyst will change the status of the defect in an appropriate system to “Closed”.
They will be responsible for the verification of the fix of bugs. When testing a game, testers need to make sure they fire at any bugs they come across. They'll do their best to track those down and won't rest until they're squashed!
Good knowledge of bug status will help them report things clearly and in a timely manner so that people know exactly what's going on, there are no misunderstandings over prioritising tasks, and any bugs should be fixed as quickly as possible.
If a problem is identified within some aspect of the application, it gets reported by users (or testers) and then forwarded to either developers or product managers concerned. Both parties can work together in order to identify the proper course of action for resolving bugs - whether that means the presence of more information from the part of testers about what steps led up to the bug being discovered, or if it's enough to know that there isn't too much in terms of existing documentation on how this kind of scenario should be handled.
It's important that they are both on board with which path each discovery takes because otherwise time will be wasted through miscommunication.
To do a proper job managing and keeping track of product bugs, it’s important to have all the right details at hand. This includes what stage each bug is in, who we need to give feedback on them, as well as their status and other related factors.
Bugs can come up at any time, and so it helps to have this information handy so that we can change direction quickly if necessary and make sure everything goes smoothly while keeping tabs on what's going on behind the scenes.
Every piece of software needs to be tested before it is released. Even the most well-tested programs have bugs, but it's important to remember that not all bugs are created equal. Some bugs will affect only a small percentage of users, while others can cause significant problems for large numbers of people. Bug life cycle helps us understand when and how we should fix them.
