Sunday, September 6, 2009

It is Fixed, or Just Fixed

The first thing you tell a Tester is "How to write Test Cases", Then you tell him how to write the Better one, and How can you make them Effective. Then you throw IEEE guide lines on Tester to make even Lengthy. Even the gurus have told us what is a good Test Case.

And Once I follow all these guide lines (not matter I want to follow or not) and find some Bug then you kill me by Telling me how to write bugs and how to report bugs how to use the Bug Tracking system and how to use it Effectively. Even the gurus have told us about writing Effective Bug reports.

And few Sr Tester/ Test Manager believes, always write how to replicate the bug and If you can't replicate its not a Bug.

Asking the tester to follow this (instead of letting him Test) is done in the Name of Communication. Communication with Developers, communication with Product owners and Communication with rest of the Team. And then there comes the advocacy part.

Once I have spent this much time on ( things helping ) Testing, I follow the guide lines for creating Test Case, I follow the Guide Line of Bug Reporting and I advocate my Bug well. Then the developer acknowledge the bug and submits it patch and changes the State in the Bug Tracking System (or an Email thread) and puts his comments. "It is Fixed" or Just "Fixed".

Ohh Come on, I deserve more then that, show some courtesy You ask me to write and write and your response is "Fixed". You think I don't need to know

What was causing the Bug?
How have you fixed it?
What other Areas might have effected with the fix?
(during the earlier cycles of Testing) You don't want me to tell that you have been real Lame in deploying the application (For Testing) you haven't updated the config file you haven't deployed all components, you were using wrong code from wrong Source Code Tag.
You don't want me to tell you can't use regular Expression to handle Input fields.
Or there was a logical Error, You were Assuming it is to be done some other way (and I wan't to know the other way)
......

Knowing the application help me a lot to Test it, What was causing it help me a lot to Understand the Bug Pattern and Help to find similar things in other parts of the Application. What you have done to fix it Help me a lot to investigate Impact of the Fix and How can I make sure it hasn't effected any other area...

Why Test Managers Keep Telling his Testers How to write Test Case/Bug Report and Its dos and don't. Why Can't They Developers to shade some light on the Bug and Its fix.

Why Development Manager Can't Tell developers to write few lines when changing the state of the Bug.

Why It is just "Fixed"?

BTW, you can avoid all this, but for that you need to have good relations with developers you can get all that information on Informal communication channels.