Do we all hate the “Invalid bug” label from our developers for the bugs reported by us? I think every tester should try to get his/her 100% bugs resolved. This requires bug reporting skills.
Take a look at our previous post on “How to write a good Bug Report? Tips and Tricks” to report bugs professionally and without any ambiguity.
The main reason for the bug being marked as invalid is due to “insufficient troubleshooting” by the tester before reporting the bug.
In this tutorial, we will focus only on troubleshooting to find the main cause of the bug. Troubleshooting will help you decide whether the ambiguity you find in your application under test is really a bug or any test setup mistake.
Yes, 50% of the bugs get marked as “invalid bugs” only due to the testers incomplete testing setup. Let’s say you found ambiguity in an application under test. You are now preparing the steps to report this ambiguity as a bug.
But wait! Have you done enough troubleshooting before reporting this bug? Or have you confirmed if it is really a bug?
What You Will Learn:
Troubleshooting to be Performed Before Reporting Any Bug
Troubleshooting for:
- What’s not working?
- Why is it not working?
- How can you make it work?
- What are the possible reasons for the failure?
The answer to the first question “What’s not working?” is sufficient for you to report the bug steps in the bug tracking system. Then why should you answer the remaining three questions? Think beyond your responsibilities. Act smarter, don’t be a dumb person who only follows his routine steps and don’t even think outside of that.
You should be able to suggest all possible solutions to resolve the bug and efficiency as well as drawbacks of each solution. This will increase your respect in the team and will also reduce the possibility of getting your bugs rejected, not due to this respect but due to your troubleshooting skills.
Before reporting any bug, make sure that it isn’t your mistake while testing, you have missed an important flag to set or you might not have configured your test setup properly.
Troubleshoot the reasons for the failure in the application. On proper troubleshooting, report the bug. We have compiled a troubleshooting list. Check to see the different reasons for failure.
Reasons for Failure
#1) If you are using any configuration file for testing your application then make sure that this file is up to date as per the application requirements. Many times some global configuration file is used to pick or set some application flags.
Failure to maintain this file as per your software requirements will lead to malfunctioning of your application under test. You can’t report it as a bug.
#2) Check if your Database is proper: Missing table might be the main reason that your application will not work properly. A classic example of this: One of my projects was querying many monthly user database tables to show the user reports.
First table existence was checked in the master table (This table was maintaining only monthly table names) and then data was queried from different individual monthly tables. Many testers were selecting a big date range to see the user reports.
But many times it was crashing the application as those tables were not present in the database of test machine server, it was giving SQL query error and they were reporting it as a bug which subsequently was getting marked as invalid by developers.
#3) If you are working on Automation Testing project then debug your script twice before coming to the conclusion that the application failure is a bug.
#4) Check if you are not using invalid access credentials for authentication.
#5) Check if software versions are compatible.
#6) Check if there are any other hardware issues that are not related to your application.
#7) Make sure your application hardware and software prerequisites are correct.
#8 ) Check if all software components are installed properly on your test machine. Check whether the registry entries are valid.
#9) For any failure, look into the ‘system event viewer’ for details. You can trace out many failure reasons from the system event log file.
#10) Before starting the test, make sure that you have uploaded all the latest version files to your test environment.
Conclusion
These are all small and common mistakes but can have a major impact on your relations and credibility in your team.
When you find that your bug is marked as invalid and the invalid bug reason is from the above-mentioned list – it will be a silly mistake and it will definitely hurt you. (At least to me!)
Share the mistakes done by you while reporting any bug. This will help other readers to learn from your experience!
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Very informative. Keep it up.
It seems there is a small spelling mistake when you said:
“… it will be a silly mistake and it will definitely heart you. (Atleast to me!)”
Shouldn’t it be:
“it will be a silly mistake and it will definitely hurt you. (Atleast to me!)”
Thanks Meraj for pointing out. Just can’t avoid auto spell check suggestions 😉
Vijay, great points. Testers should be striving for a 100% actionable bug count – most of that involves being sure they write actionable bugs (bugs which are true defects and which management can make a decision on), and to a lesser degree it involves advocating their bugs.
As a test manager, I track my team’s actionable bug stats ensuring they are effective. It’s not the most important metric in a tester’s performance, but (like cricket or baseball stats) it shows areas where a tester or a team can improve.
John O.
http://thoughtsonqa.blogspot.com
Good article but I disagree with “You should be able to suggest all possible solutions to resolve the bug…”
Possible solutions can often only be found within the code. For a white box tester it might be good to look into the code but is it really his job to search for the bug and propose a fix? I doubt, cause if he found it then he could just fix it. That’s the job of the programmer since he is the one with the background.
A blackbox tester will hardly look into the code. What he might suggest is a solution for a change request, e.g. handling of software, etc.
It is very important to verify the testing setup before executing any test case or test plan, other wise at the end of the day you will find more than 50% of the bugs found are invalid & that really hurts. Final output is that you might miss few important bugs & eventually with correct setup all test cases execution will start from scratch, waste of efforts & time.
Apart from this its really annoying to the programmer to debug an invalid bug to find the exact problem in the code, & after hours of debugging efforts, when it comes to know that the reported bug is invalid, programmer will definitely feel angry, & the tester will loose the respect from the programmer.
One of my experience that while testing some configuration security rules of the application I miss out to set the correct value for the configuration parameter while testing I found a bug which was producible only because of the incorrect configuration parameter value, bug assign programmer waste more than a half day to debug the problem, but he couldn’t able to reproduce it, eventually he found real cause of that bug (incorrect configuration variable). People start doubting tester’s ability & productivity just because of INVALID BUGS. Hence my very kind advice to all my tester friends please verify the test setup before executing any test.
Vijay,i think it would be better if we check the above steps before we start actual testing.(Ready with the test bed)
Please can some one help me ” where to find the system event viewer”
For any failure look into ‘system event viewer’ for details.
Hi Vijay,
I recently got information of this site.
I have read some of your articles so far.
Each of them has got really useful material in it.
Can u please tell me, how to test an application which has been developed based on another product like Busines Objects or IBM Websphere etc It occassionally happens that while testing this type of applications,testers give bugs which are related to the product itself rather than the application under test.
Thanks for this article vijay. It is very important that testers log bugs which have very least chance of getting rejected. Logging invalid bugs not only hurts your validity as a tester but also wastes a lot of time both on testing and development side.
I want details about white box testing techniqe….
Realizing you won’t be able to test everything – how do you decide what to test first?
Can anyone answer this question?
Hi Thiru,
How r u ?R u able to do QTP now.fine
white box testing is all abt testing the inner functionality means completely involving into the applications means getdown into the coding section.Logic they are used and some other cases.
ok
Thanks,
Haripriya
it’s superb….
very informative. it really help to improve bug reporting skills.
Hi Vijay,
It is Very Good Article,for Upcoming Testers..
Hi All,
I am a new member of this community and found the stuffs quit useful and interesting. I have around 2 years of exp in this field with a reputated US MNC.
In future i will try to involve myself with the articles more.
Best of luck
Hi all,
Oftenly I face the problem of rejection of my bugs.I think is because of lack of domin expertise,improper communnication and undersranding and interpretating,lack doc related to change request and even deve egos…As a tester we must be proactive in accomplishing the requirements for good testing of the appli…Tester should be in the commdnding position, but it is other way around in many organisations.Tester should have eagle eyes and heart of a child to create better working place
Dear navitha,
It better to do functional testing when u get a build after doing smoke for all ur concerned modules/application…
VERY GOOD POINTS
Its a nice one. I would say the Tester should actually see if the bug is reproducible and test twice before marking it as a bug. Also check whether there are any dependencies that have made this bug.
Once while i was testing a dropdown for States, cities etc for a form and clicked on submit with random data i found the form not being saved and no error message or not navigating to any page. When i tried to reproduce i couldnt. I tried hard with all possible permutations and combinations and found it just wasnt working for a single combination.
It was a good bug and hence wanted to just add that as a tester we need to have patience and check for all the combinations.
Hi..good inputs..keep it up…
another silly mistake is not deleting the cached files. because developers when try to reproduce the bug will have a clean environment not same as yours
This Blog itself is a great help for Testrs…………………..
🙂
Hi
I am Novice tester and this site is very helpful for me. But i want a favor. Can someone send me more, a simple but meaningful data about testing.
This post is really very helpful for testers.
can anyone explain what are the roles and responsbilites of software tester?
What is the diffirence between ‘Bug’ and ‘Change Request’
Thanks for the Good Article.
I would like to add one more point to your points.
The tester should also have very good patience to report a bug very effectively as a sudden over joy(misbehavior) might not be a bug.
Can Anyone send Automation Frame work
Hi Navitha,
It better to do functional testing when u get a build after doing smoke for all ur concerned modules/appl
Cheers
Seshireddy
To Annie, “Please can some one help me ” where to find the system event viewer””
when we are doing performance testing all the system event log files will get recorded on the systemout.log and the errors in systemerror.log and also in tivoli. As a tester one should look into these log files before reporting any application downtime/failure in load test/ high response time issues. This will helps the tester to get to know where what went wrong.
@ Debashish,
I tried to leave in a comment in ur blog, but couldn’t do it so im posting here, I tested 2,048 characters in google search bar, but I dint not get any bad error or page cannot be displayed error
and when i entered a long string and clicked on Search button it displayed me a new page with message on top
“testers” (and any subsequent words) was ignored because we limit queries to 32 words.
hi………. all are talking about testing………..
it have a bright future r? nt?
I had completed my MCA 5th semister. Now i am doing project work”MARKETING ANALYTICAL ANALYSIS” ON .NET along with .NET course in BANGLORE. This project work will help for my future? or not? I think it is relevant to marketing field….
How will be the .NET based job openings………?
what are the resources for getting job early for MCA students now? I wiil passedout March/April 2010.Please send your materials&suggessions for my mail………..
ID: k.beeru@gmail.com
ThanQ
—
BEERAPPA.K
Hi,
I am thinking to Join testing course and i have done my BCA from IGNOU.Can you please tell me is that will correct if I choose it.
Regards,
Manjula
Hi Manjula,
Testing course can be done by all the stream. i’m mechnaical engg but now working as software tester in chennai.
i did a course, real time project work and started searching and now joined in software firm.
Testing course can be done by december 2009 but how write test cases
It is very good
How to get the Testing Certifications in Hyderabad…
nice one…
can any1 send me testing materials/links to study..
i m tryg for a entry level testing job in bangalore..
thnx..
Really a good article. keep posting some useful info like this.
Pretty useful. Expect more such articles for the professionals from the professionals.
very informative..thanks for sharing
kq
Really nice article !!Keep posting such articles ,it creates new enthusiasm for testing 🙂
In one of my interviews, I was asked “How do I debug an issue/bug related to an e-commerce payment page that directs me to a blank page after clicking on Place my Order instead of popping up thank you message and order number”
As a manual tester, how do I perform debugging to add more information for the developer?
Thanks.