Bug Advocacy
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Bug reports are not just neutral technical reports. They are persuasive documents. The key goal of the bug report author is to provide high-quality information, well written, to help stakeholders make wise decisions about which bugs to fix. Key aspects of the content of this course include:
Defining key concepts (such as software error, quality, and the bug processing workflow)
The scope of bug reporting (what to report as bugs, and what information to include)
Bug reporting as persuasive writing
Bug investigation to discover harsher failures and simpler replication conditions
Excuses and reasons for not fixing bugs
Making bugs reproducible
Lessons from the psychology of decision-making: bug-handling as a multiple-decision process dominated by heuristics - and biases
Style and structure of well-written bug reports
More info on the Learning Objectives for Bug Advocacy: Effective Bug Investigation and Reporting are available on the BBST.info website.
The lecture presents the multi-dimensional view of quality used throughout the BBST courses.
How to develop reports that clearly communicate bugs in their harshest honest light so that decision-makers can operate with insight into the consequences of each bug.
Strategies for exploring non-reproducible bugs to make them reproducible or at least to provide information to help troubleshooting efforts.
How testers can make their reports useful and more credible for better decision-making by others working in the development effort.
In addition to the quality of bug reports, a tester's actions can influence how much credibility and influence they have on a project. This lecture draws on research on bias and signal detection theory to explore some of the things that enhance or diminish a tester's credibility.
The final lecture introduces the RIMGEN acronym to guide testers in writing better bug reports.
(35 mins)
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(29 mins)