Lazycoder

You can’t ever find all the bugs

Coding Horror: Not All Bugs Are Worth Fixing

Jeff Atwood has a great post where he talks about bug triaging.

“But for everything else, there’s a serious problem: testers aren’t real users. I’d give a bug from a customer ten times the weight of a bug reported by a tester.”

later in the comments:

“I didn’t get into it in the post, but the ‘how do you define *bug*?’ question always comes up at some point.”

Between these two statements , one unspoken point jumps out at me.

You can’t believe that your testers have found ALL of the bugs. One reason is that testers “aren’t real users”. They don’t use the application in the same way a user does. You can’t always guarantee that your application will be run under ideal conditions. Anytime someone tells me that they have zero unresolved bugs in their database, I tell them, “Just wait a bit. It’ll fill up.”

The second reason is that what a user considers a “bug” isn’t necessarily what you and your tester consider to be a “bug”. You might end up grouping it into a “feature request” or “edge case”, but that doesn’t make it any less of a bug to your user.

re:edge cases – I never classify people as edge cases during bug triage or design meetings. Usually if you do that, the person in question gets very defensive and you waste a lot of energy discussing how very important they are and how extremely vital their feature/bug is rather than focusing on the bug or feature. This happens when people emotionally invest in their bugs or features. they become a part of their sense of self and identity. (he said after having squeaked by with a ‘B’ in Psych 101). Sometimes, they only thing more emotionally charged than a bug triage meeting is a code review.