Top 10 Common Problems in Bug Tracking and Solutions

Bug Tracking is the most important part in Software development life cycle. In recent article we have seen about “What should be done after a bug is found?”. But common few problems may possibly lead towards the improper tracking of bug.

Let discuss what top 10 common problems faced by the team members while keeping the transparency in the reported bug:

1) Improper bug logging process: Basic rule in bug reporting is bug should properly described & it should be self explainable. In the Bug all required fields should be provided which help to communicate bug to developers. If the bug is not properly reported means missing of few required fields like Incorrect Defect Title, Missing Expected Result, Error from log file or Steps to reproduce etc. which increase the defect life cycle process.

2) Use of different bug tracking template: If all team member are using different Issue Tracking template to report the issues which may lead to discrepancy at a later stages. Due to this reason standard bug tracking or logging template should be used, which could help a lot in the report generation.

3) Improper Defect Triage Process: Bug Triage process to allow you to discuss about all open defects & take actions on them. The participants of this meeting are developers, managers & testers. They gather together in one place (Physically or virtually) to analyze all defects and taking decisions on action items. All issues reported by tester must have common understanding over all peoples. Without this meeting it is very difficult to understand the reason for blocking test execution.

4) Bug Tracking Tools: Currently in the market many more open source Test/Defect management tools available. Some of the project affords to buy Commercial Issue Tracking Software’s. The defect management process may vary from tool to tool. Even if freeware or open source tool if the process is not well defined or tester is not aware of the process of tool then they have to face many challenges to handle defects.

5) Improper set up of Severity & Priority: Defect Priority signifies how important & urgently it is to fix this defect. In other words Priority means how fast it has to be fixed and Defect Severity means the degree of impact that a defect has on the development or operation of a component or system. The defect severity & priority may vary from defect to defect; also the fixing time of defect will be not same all the time. The fixing of the defect is totally based on the priority of the defect. Usually testing and development teams are not well educated on severity and priority of the defect which could affect the bug tracking in defect life cycle.

6) SPOC (Single Point of Contact): Many of the times a keen Single Point of Contact not present in team to talk about defects to the stakeholders.

7) No Control on Test Environment: Sometimes testers don’t have control on test environment & they are not aware of what all is deployed in the current deployed build & what not. Also development team make informal changes in the test environment which fixes or added new issues in the test environment which testers not aware of. Not full control on test environment causes a retesting & regression testing which affects quality level of software application.

8) If team is using their own medium to convey the defects to developers like Email or Phone which cause bad impact on Bug tracking and this is totally a bad practice. Tester should report all defects via defect tracking tools which help to understand the stability of the software application & these statistics will help a lot for managing upcoming releases.

9) If maintaining of defects statuses is not proper then it could affect the defect tracking i.e. even if bug is Fixed and Verified still showing is in open status in the Bug Tracking Report. This could give incorrect statistics in the bug statistic report.

10) Did you notice that Point #10 has been kept blank, so why don’t you come up with What all problems you faced in the Issue Tracking? Feel free to let me hear your problems by commenting below.

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