Fun with bugs! - MoT Bloggers Club May 2021

 The MoT's Bloggers Club always gives me good inspiration for blogging topics. This one is about bugs!


A few different "fun" bug-related scenarios come to mind, so I'll jump strait to the point!

The Environmental "Bug"

This is kind of a false positive bug - it is a bug that is not a bug, per se. We all probably seen something like this, a feature that works in Test but not in the Acceptance environment, for example or if our regression tests suddenly start failing, but there were no code changes introduced to the system under test - rather there was a change in the infrastructure causing our tests to fail. These issues can be very frustrating and hard to pinpoint. The best way to avoid them is to avoid secrecy and to be fully transparent since any change, no matter how innocent may seem can cause unexpected complication in a large complex system.


Bug Ping Pong

Now this is not the case where some Stakeholder decides that the reported defect is not important enough so it gets ignored. No, this is much worse and it happens in companies that lack the culture of quality. Often when a bad developer doesn't know how do fix something, or does not have the time, they will claim that a certain bug should no longer be an issue since there was a change in a partially related part of the system that probably resolved this issue as well. Sadly that is rarely the case and this tends to lead to pointless re-testing and ping-ponging of the bug, where the tester returns it back saying that it is still a  valid issue, the developer claims that it is fixed again and the cycle where everyone's time is just needlessly waster goes on and on. If you work in a company where these kind of situations keep happening and the management is not doing anything to improve this, the best thing is to bid your farewell and look for new opportunities.

Dumb Bugs

Somewhat similar to the previous example, as these kinds of issues can be avoided with a minimum of common sense. These kind of bugs arise from bad/unclear requirements which get blindly accepted and implemented instead of being challenged and improved upon early in the design stages. Usually, when you report a bug like this you get a robotic reply in Jira this is working "as designed" - such as a bad UX solution that is most certain to annoy future users which will result in lot of tickets being reported in production. To prevent this, testers (designers, BAs, developers, as well and others) should be involved in the earliest stages of the software development - it should not be done by a single person! I have not witnessed this when working with good developers, but subpar programmers who just code what is asked without critically thinking will usually behave like this and it can be infuriating!


These are the bugs that I have found to be the most fun, what are yours?










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