Monday, December 5, 2011

Be Creative: Bug-Hunting Tips

Be Creative: In such situations you have to be creative with your test ideas. Think of scenarios that have not yet been tried. This is where you’ll save time by first understanding the duplicate bugs. It may sound hard, but it is time well spent in trying to understand the application and the scope for the test cycle. This creativity not only helps you for this particular test cycle, but will prove to be useful in other situations as well. So the point that you need to remember is this: Don’t just look for simple bugs.

Go through the other reports logged and try to reproduce the bug and see if you can dig deeper for serious bugs. It does help to generate quite a few new ideas if you take some time and spend in reading other tester reports.

Be Patient: This one of the key attributes for a tester – not only just for those working on uTest projects. Keep your cool, understand the application, and try to come up with test ideas that may yield some fresh insight. Because you are working with testers all across the globe, it may possible that the test idea that you just thought of has been implemented by other tester, but that should not make you impatient.

Be an Explorer: Just don’t look out for the simple bugs that do not need much more exploration, although if you find them that is all well and good. Explore the application by targeting specific parts of the application. When you start exploring the application you will begin to distinguish the deeper issues, instead of bugs which are just on the surface.

While exploring the application makes sure that you are still very much in control of what are you trying to. At times exploration leads to the part of the application which is not yet suppose to test, so just be careful! Remember to read the scope of the test cycle before you do anything.

Be Agile: It is good to be agile, but it’s important not to lose your focus. Make sure that you are taking proper notes, taking screen shots or videos, or even using tools like Session Tester.

So, if you are ready to practice all the above then you are certainly going to have good time while working on the test cycles. Not to mention that it also helps you in planning/splitting your tasks as you move further along.

So, the next time if you accept an invite and see bugs logged, you got to know what to do, right?