Dear son,
As I anticipate the day upon which you are born, I think about what you will be like. What advice I will give you when you’re older. What hardships you might go through. I realize that since you are my son, you will likely be somewhat like me. If that is indeed the case, then I want to prepare you for the most probable outcome. (more…)
So you’ve found the bug and know exactly (hopefully) how to reproduce it. Now you’ve got to tell someone, and that someone is likely the developer. So how do you go about documenting and submitting the bug? Here are some helpful tips for the end of the process:
It’s great to find bugs, but if you can’t or don’t explain them properly to the person responsible for fixing the bug, at best you’ll confuse/frustrate him while wasting his time, and at worst you could prevent the bug from being fixed at all. There are two key principles in documenting a bug. Specificity and perspicuity (or being clear).
There are two primary methods for discovering bugs and. The first method is natural testing, and the second is systematic testing.
There are two perspectives we usually test from. The customer and the back end user. Both of these perspectives need to be tested extensively so we can be sure orders can be placed and all normal functions performed. So when you start testing, pick a perspective and test from it. Don’t meander around, aimlessly pushing buttons and links. While you may find bugs this way, it’s generally a waste of your time. We need to target the important processes and move down from there.
For the first installment of this series, I’d like to set some parameters. So here are some basic definitions:
Beta Testing – For the purpose of this series, this will refer to testing a website to find bugs (see definition 2) and document them.
Bug – Anything that deviates from the standard or normal function. It’s anything that is not how it’s supposed to be, not just something that generates an error. (more…)
I spent five years as a part time and sometimes full time Beta Tester on a database program. One of the reasons I was eventually immersed into the online marketing world was because of the analytical skills I had obtained and honed during my years of beta testing. Now that I’ve worked in marketing for some time, I find myself reminiscing over the days of testing and finding problems to fix. (more…)
