HOW EFFECTIVELY FIND BUGS?
Having done some interviewing with our QA Specialists we want to give you a list of tips on How effectively look for bugs and find them.
There are QA Engineers who find many bugs, and there are those who find much less. These tips can help you to find more bugs than you can find now. They are quite simple and are proved by years-long experienced engineers.
FOCUS ON FINDING BUGS
Always keep in mind that there are bugs and lots of them that you should find NOW. Bugs definitely exist (yes, it’s disappointing but true) and focusing on this thought can help you find as much as possible.
DON’T IGNORE BUGS
If you notice that something is not OK — write bug reports immediately. Figure out how to make something better? Document your idea until you remember it. As a result, you will have more found bugs and nothing will be missed or lost.
ORGANIZE SHORT SESSIONS OF FINDING BUGS
Devote 30–120 minutes one time per day or per week — without any distractions and find bugs (no checking emails, talking with colleagues, chats, social networks — close everything and open the app you are testing). Organize such sessions systematically — it is important. And do not forget about the previous two tips.
Smart people have long thought up and described everything in books, no less smart people write blogs, books on these topics and make speeches at conferences.
You need this information, and moreover — you should not just read about it, but think about how each testing practice was born, where it is applicable and where it is more effective, how to apply it to your project.
About ten years ago, if you started working as a QA engineer, you could afford the first couple of months to not know about testing theory. Today this is what you will be asked at any interview, even before you start testing something)).
READ AND STUDY SOFTWARE TESTING THEORY
Smart people have long thought up and described everything in books, no less smart people write blogs, books on these topics and make speeches at conferences.
You need this information, and moreover — you should not just read about it, but think about how each testing practice was born, where it is applicable and where it is more effective, how to apply it to your project.
About ten years ago, if you started working as a QA engineer, you could afford the first couple of months to not know about testing theory. Today this is what you will be asked at any interview, even before you start testing something.
TEST DIFFERENT PROGRAMS
Do not limit yourself to testing one thing, for example, testing the project you are currently working on. Try to test the sites of mail, pizzerias, visa centers, online cinemas, mobile applications or something that you often use or that you are interested in. Learn how it works, what typical problems are found on different resources, what bugs are found in general, and which ones you find the fastest.
CHAT WITH OTHER QA
Communicate with other QA engineers, let them tell you their bug search stories at three in the morning, or how something was rolled out into production without testing. Or stories about which framework they wrote on their project and what bugs this framework allows to find. At the same time, you don’t even have to interact with people — watch youtube videos with other people’s speeches, attend conferences/meetings/gatherings / theme nights, subscribe to QA chat rooms and blogs — there is a lot of similar material, something new appears every day.
All this communication and information will give you a constantly updated database from which the neural network in your head will construct an intuition that will help you find bugs where you yourself do not consciously expect to find them.
MEDITATE
Think about why people cannot write code without bugs, why it is impossible to find all the bugs, and why even some bugs in production are normal and not critical (but this is not accurate). Think about different questions related to bugs — formulate your own philosophy about such questions, look for answers, back up the answers with real-life stories. If your brain constantly returns to such thoughts, over time you change your mindset and begin to find more and more bugs, and do more and more cool tests and checks.
DO SOMETHING NEW
Mark areas of the project that you’ve tested well, and focus on phased testing of areas that you haven’t tested yet. Periodically switch between project areas and test methods. Have you been doing functional testing for half a year? — find an opportunity for 2–3 weeks to do load testing or test design (not checks, but planning), or for example, write some kind of autotests for the most critical, not yet covered areas, just to switch and let your mind look at your usual tasks from a different angle.
AUTOMATE
Seriously, there are people (and sometimes there are good QA among them) who do the same tests with their hands every day (a really sad case — checking login/registration, every day, with hands). If you recognize yourself in this description or you have been thinking of automating something from your daily work for a long time — do it, take your mind off all tasks and script (even if it is a very clumsy and simple script).
Your brain does not like repetitive actions, it turns off on them. And you need it to find a bug! Use your brain, make sure that it is constantly in an active state of finding inconsistencies with your expectations.
Transfer repeated checks to automatic scripts, and let your brain and your intuition work with something fresh and new, there will be new bugs right there, you will see.
CONNECT WITH DEVELOPERS AND USERS
Think of a way to get the opportunity to communicate with your developers and users of your product. Read their reviews, ask the user support team for problems, sign up as a volunteer for processing custom bug reports, or work for a couple of hours a week in the user support team (or just ask to add you to their chat room).
Sometimes you find the most important problems at the moment of communication with other people. And those implementation features, new features and the technical duty that the programmer will tell you about are excellent grounds for thinking about where the bugs are still hidden.
User stories about how they use the system are also great reasons to review your test plan/checklist and make sure that you check the basic scenarios of real users. After all, the most important thing here! And bugs can be found everywhere :)
I hope this article was useful for you ;) Do not forget to read our other publications!
You can turn to independent testing services that will help you improve the reliability, quality, functionality, and performance of your software, reduce costs and accelerate the time it takes for IT products to enter the market with the help of these types of testing.
And don’t miss a chance to let professionals provide your project with TOP-NOTCH Staffing Services. I am sure that Fintegro Company Inc. corresponds to all those tips described above ;)
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