Share via

Know the bugs in your area

  • Article

This is a simple one, but easy to overlook. I'm going to make the assumption that you are familiar with bug reporting, and that you have some sort of bug tracking database.

Bugs (as in the bug reports, not the actual product mis-behavior itself) are just another way of communicating information. There may have been times in your past when you were not included in an email thread which concerned a feature you owned. In this case, you'd probably go to whoever sent the email, and complain about not being brought “into the loop”.

Let's say that someone else testing another feature finds a bug in your area. With bugs, there is only one addressee (the person that the bug is assigned to). As a tester, you don't really want this bug to get assigned to you while it's still active, but you would like to at least know about the bug. The solution? I use a program called Bug Watcher which looks at the bug database every 15 minutes or so, and tells me if there were any changes to any bug matching a given criteria. In my case, I want to know about NGEN bugs, so I look for any bugs that have the word NGEN in the title. This is great because I am able to really get a good feel as to what are the current issues in the area. Sometimes I can also play around in the area where the bug was found, and find another bug or two. This is also a great way to reduce the number of duplicate bugs.

Monitoring bugs in your area is a great way to stay “in the loop.”

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2004
    The Bugzilla 'watch other users' feature has always been handy in this regard.
  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2004
    I'm not very familiar with how this feature works. From what I can tell, it sends you email when your dev gets a bug on their plate? What if your dev is working on another feature that you're not testing? For most scenarios, it sounds like this should work. Besides, more information is (most of the time) better than not enough.
  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2004
    It is really nice option. The tool that we are using for Defect tracking, we use to query for the bugs where title contain some keyword. Whenever we log a bug, we used to give feature number in the beginning of title. Btw, we can query easily. But tools like Bug Watcher will be very flexible.
  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2007
    PingBack from http://feeds.maxblog.eu/item_454465.html