More than ten years ago, when a customer encountered a bug in the process of using it, just cut a picture or organize it together in a Word document, send the bug information from QQ or email to the development, and then repair and update it online after the development receives it.
But now regular software projects no longer use this primitive way to report bugs, but will use testing tools to help report and track bugs, even if you occasionally see projects still reporting bugs in the original way, You will definitely find it unprofessional.
But I don’t know if you have thought about this issue carefully. Why don’t you report bugs through QQ/WeChat/email? What testing tools are there to help you better find, report and track bugs in the software? Today we will discuss this issue.
Bug tracking tool
I think you must be familiar with the term "Bug". It is a defect or error in our software. The birth of the word is also very interesting. On September 9, 1947, a small moth got into a computer circuit at Harvard University, causing the system to fail to work. The operator posted the moth on the computer log and wrote "the first actual bug found Case".
Although the history of bugs is more than 60 years old, bug tracking tools have not appeared for long. The earliest bugs in software projects were reported through email, instant messaging and other primitive methods. It was not until 1992 that there was the first professional bug tracking software GNATS.
After that, professional bug tracking tools such as Bugzilla, Jira, MantisBT, etc. gradually became available. And now, bug tracking tools have become one of the indispensable tools in software projects. So, how does the bug tracking tool gradually replace QQ, email and other methods to deal with bugs?
Why use a bug tracking tool?
In the last article, we learned the theoretical knowledge related to software testing. The main job of software testing is to find, report and track bugs. The tester finds that the bug is only the first step. It is also necessary to report the bug so that the developer can know and locate it, and track the entire bug fix process.
The way of reporting bugs by QQ or email seems quick and simple, but there are many problems:
Bugs cannot be tracked effectively. I don’t know if a bug has been fixed. The
efficiency is very low. Developers are frequently interrupted by such bug reports and have to stop their work to identify the bugs; they
cannot understand intuitively. The bug status of the current project, such as: how many have been fixed, how many have not been fixed, and whether the number of bugs has increased or decreased recently.
It is not difficult to see that the bugs reported through QQ and other methods are all text with pictures and other information, which is difficult to retrieve and classify. Bug tracking tools use structured data to define bugs. Each bug has some key information. Classify and retrieve bugs.
In the use of the bug tracking tool, a basic bug information includes:
Title;
description (including key information such as expected results, actual results and reproduction steps);
priority;
assignee;
status (New, Open, Rejected, Fixed, etc.);
others.
In this case, it is easy to classify and retrieve the bugs, for example:
If Zhang San wants to view all the bugs assigned to him, just list all the bugs whose assignee is Zhang San; if
you want to list all the unresolved bugs, just list all the bugs whose status is not Close or Rejected.
In this way, for developers, they can intuitively see which bugs they have to deal with, and the description of the bug can also help reproduce the bug and quickly locate the cause of the bug; for project managers or testers, it can be seen intuitively If any bugs have not been resolved, keep abreast of the progress of the project.
In software projects, it is necessary to process good practices and instrumentize good processes. Bug tracking tools implement this well and streamline the bug resolution process.
The bug status you usually see in the bug tracking system seems to be just a limited status list, but behind it is actually a set of bug resolution procedures. As shown in the picture below, a bug has a complete process from creation to the end.
Through such a process, developers can centrally allocate bugs and solve them separately according to their priorities, while testers can know the status changes of bug processing for the first time, verify them in time, and facilitate tracking of the entire process.
Precautions for using bug tracking tools
The purpose of reporting a bug is to track the bug and help developers reproduce until the problem is solved. In order to achieve efficient collaboration between testing and development, there are some things that need attention.
First of all, all bugs should be managed and tracked through the bug tracking system, and bugs should no longer be tracked through QQ/WeChat/email. If customers and colleagues report bugs through other channels other than the bug tracking system, they should be submitted to the bug tracking system for management and tracking.
Then, multiple bugs cannot be merged into one, and one bug creates an independent ticket. I have encountered some tests that combined several bugs into one ticket to report in order to save trouble. The problem is that these bugs must be fixed before this ticket can change the status. If one of the bugs is not verified, it needs to be reopened. The entire Ticket.
Furthermore, it is very important to describe clearly how to reproduce the bug. If a bug cannot be reproduced, and there is no auxiliary information such as logs and screenshots, it is very difficult to locate, and it will waste a lot of developers' time to locate the bug.
Finally, don't use the bug tracking system as a discussion board. A common scenario in a project is that under a ticket, like the discussion board, a lot of comments are added. The development thinks it is not a bug, the test thinks it is a bug, and the development thinks that the product design is not clearly defined. The product manager should make it clear , The ball kicked around, and the problem was not solved in the end.
The main function of the bug tracking system is to track bugs, not for discussion and wrangling. In the case of the above situation, one of the parties should take the initiative and bring relevant people to discuss face-to-face, confirm the problem in person, and solve it immediately.
Summary: There are many tools such as Bugzilla, Jira, MantisBT, Zen Tao. Many companies now use Zen Tao for project management. Previous articles have published Zen Tao related articles, and the official account also provides Zen Tao installation packages. You can download and build it yourself. Beginners only need to master one tool for managing bugs, because they are all the same, and they just need to understand the process.