Defect Tracking System – Wastage of Money & Time ???

As a QA I have been logging bugs since 5 years. But what do we do with that ? A typical flow:
image
If this is the only thing we need to do then why taking so much of pain to have a defect tracking system.
To log a standard bug (Standard Bug= Broken Functionality), we need to write steps to reproduce, pre-requisites (if any), expected result, actual result, priority, severity, snapshot (if any), Test environment details and finally save it. This takes around roughly 3-5 minutes to log a bug. To say truth, I have never seen any report coming out of defect tracking system which is of use in analyzing the pattern of bug or finding out any trend in them. All I have seen apart from tracking usage, is the summary of bugs with count based on Priority and Severity. Is that the only purpose of Defect Tracking System? If that is the case then why not use a Google spreadsheet rather then investing money of the company and time of QA in a bug logging system. I am sure if we mine the data which is created by bug logging system we are bound to get some real useful information on the project like quality of the code, bug density apart from Bug Convergence, bug resolution rate etc.
So I think if we are using the defect logging system just for tracking bugs and having a count of them, then I would strongly suggest to use an excel sheet. Allow a tester to test more rather than spend more time on logging.

Comments

  1. Deepak Kumar BeheraSeptember 21, 2010

    Probably you will find some answers from the following link.
    http://www.inflectra.com/Documents/Testwarez_2009_Use_Proper_Tool.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nishant VermaSeptember 21, 2010

    Dude that pdf doesn't answer that question!
    We have information but my concern is what's the use of creating such huge information which comes at the cost of "Testing Time" and no one bothers about it once the bug status is "Closed".

    Thanks,
    Nishant Verma

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousSeptember 22, 2010

    I recommend you try Assembla's bug tracking tool http://www.assembla.com/features/bug-tracking is the easiest one available and it only takes seconds (I mean it!!!) to log a bug, assign it and prioritize it. It's REALLY easy and time saving (they use a system like gmail stars) and have lots of cool features.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nishant VermaSeptember 22, 2010

    @Anonymous Friend I am not looking for any alternative Bug Tracking Tool, I am more interested in using the data which is collected out of Defect Tracking System.

    Thanks for the tool you suggested. I will definitely have a look into it.

    Thanks,
    Nishant Verma

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mark NeedhamSeptember 22, 2010

    It'd be interesting to hear what you have to say about even tracking the severity and priority in the first place.

    My current thinking is that it seems to take up time and creates confusion about what we should actually should be fixing. It gets worse when we have a 'quality gate' of severity of bugs that we should be fixing.

    For me it seems much simpler to just state whether or not we are going to fix the bug for the next release or not. If we're not then why are we tracking it anyway? And for the bugs we care about just out them in priority order on the wall and let people pick them up.

    Do we lose anything important by taking that approach?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Nishant VermaSeptember 23, 2010

    @Mark I feel 'Severity' and 'Priority' makes sense at least to the people in Triage process (When concerned QA who has logged the bug is not around).
    But I agree with you that we need one more field should be present which says whether the bug will be fixed or not?

    We know in Triage we basically take a call on all the bugs logged and de-prioritize the one which are not to be fixed.

    So I suppose Mingle should add one more field "To be Fixed" :)


    Thanks,
    Nishant

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Your comments will be reviewed and then published !

Popular posts from this blog

The 3 qualities that will always help you become better at almost anything…

Image
Have we ever noticed how excited we are when we start anything? But it’s a sad fact that 70% of people abandon what they have started with so much energy and love. It could be as small as building a hobby or starting a pet project or even an activity or a side learning we started. “ Well begun is half done .” Aristotle did say this but we are judged for how we have finished something. You separate yourself fro m  the masses when you choose to give that task a finish.  The first quality is finishing off what you started and it helps develop mental stamina or willpower.   It builds confidence and inculcates as a habit in a long run. You don’t need to sign up for the mammoth activity to build this habit, even finishing mundane day-to-day routine tasks will help. Diligence — the quality of working carefully and with a lot of effort Diligence is a quality that almost never will get unnoticed. It’s one of the underlying traits of great works or success. The key to mediocrity on the o
Read More »

Test Case Paths : Happy, Sad & Bad

Image
I came back from the background of writing test cases which were categorized in either Positive or Negative test cases. Positive test cases were business flows which may or may not give any result but they will certainly not give any exception or error. Negative test cases are those test cases which were bound to result into some exception or better expressed as error causing scenarios.  Then those positive test cases were prioritized as High/Medium/Low . Finally it used to result in quite a comprehensive test case document. Then it will go through the process of review and few more updates or change of priority etc. Certainly it is a tedious process. Here in ThoughtWorks I got introduced to different way of categorizing test cases called “ Happy/Sad/Bad ”. A test case which results you in a positive result is a Happy path , for e.g. entering proper username and password on login page. A test case which yields no result like entering invalid username and invalid password on a logi
Read More »