| Software Bug Tracking : Who Is Responsible? |
| Wednesday, January 17, 2007 |
From: SoftwareProjects.org
Bug tracking. It's the Achilles' heel of software development. It's easy to report bugs found in software, but unless the bugs are properly tracked, all the way through to their resolution, one can never be sure whether these nuances truly have been swatted. Like criminals on the run, without proper bug tracking procedures, those responsible for fixing bugs spend their days living on the edge and forever looking over their shoulders. For they know that at any time, those bugs that weren't tracked can reappear, and create chaos.
But exactly who is responsible for bug tracking? Is this the responsibility of only one person? If so, then is the person who reported the bug responsible? Or is the person who supposedly "fixed" the bug responsible? Or is the QA person responsible? Maybe all of these people are in some way responsible for bug tracking.
Assuming the software has not yet gone into production, most often the responsibility for bug tracking lies with the software tester. Software testers have the job of verifying that the keystrokes they push produce the desired outcome. When this does not happen, testers must report these findings back to the developers.
Note however, that software testers are not required to fix software discrepancies. But generally, they are responsible for tracking a known bug. Once a programmer reports back that the bug has been corrected, the software tester must confirm this. They must reproduce the keystrokes that initially led them to the software discrepancy, and confirm whether (a) the bug has not been corrected, or (b) it has been corrected, or (c) it has been corrected, however, now something else is not working correctly.
If choice (a) was the typical outcome, bug tracking would not be such an enormous task. However, more often than not, one of the latter two choices is the outcome. With all that programmers have to do, they cannot be expected to track the status of all of the software's bugs in their heads. Nor can a software tester be expected to maintain this amount of information in their heads, either.
Bug tracking involves more than just assigning the problem from person to person to person. You're not playing a game of "hot potato"; you're trying to get working software released to those who need it. Before a programmer can even begin to "fix" a bug, he needs to know why it occurred. He needs to know the steps which led to the error so he knows where to go in the code to look for the problem. When reporting bugs, it's also important for the tester to say what should have happened, and also what actually did happen.
A colored-coded sticky note bug tracking system might work conceptually, but not in reality. And don't even think about sending email messages back and forth as an effective bug tracking method. When you're involved with serious software development, bug tracking software is the only thing software testers and developers can rely on. |
Posted @ Wednesday, January 17, 2007   |
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