Bug Advocacy
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.
- Lecture 1 (35 mins)
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.
- Lecture 2 (27 mins)
Strategies for exploring non-reproducible bugs to make them reproducible or at least to provide information to help troubleshooting efforts.
- Lecture 3 (17 mins)
How testers can make their reports useful and more credible for better decision-making by others working in the development effort.
- Lecture 4 (12 mins)
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.
- Lecture 5 (21 mins)
The final lecture introduces the RIMGEN acronym to guide testers in writing better bug reports.
- Lecture 6 (29 mins)
Last modified 3yr ago