Top Notch Practices For Catching Bugs in Software Applications?

How important is it for you to detect flaws in your early product development life-cycle? Wanna save your organization from bearing heavy financial losses? Then you must have qualified testers in your QA team or may hire services of independent software testing companies to make your application bug-free in early software development life-cycle. Catching an important bug in your application can help you relieve from facing costs and increases your chances of standing out.

No doubt, all systems, and applications may have some glitches. The desire to create a bug-free application is in contradiction with the reality i.e the lack of special tools to uncover the glitches until it's too late in the application development life-cycle. On the other hand, catching bugs can be a great challenge for testers. Many testers are formally trained before it is expected of them to catch bugs while many use their own specific innate abilities to detect. In the Information Technology domain, effective bug hunting is a competitive niche among the testers. 

Here we are spilling out some of the best practices for hunting bugs, which testers can adopt to ensure best quality software product;

Try to explore as much as you can - It is widely being observed that a loophole in tester’s failure to hunt for bugs is their strict adherence to the pre-defined test cases. Test cases are good at detecting flaws and errors but they can't make sure that an application is 100% free of bugs. It is therefore recommended for testers to explore the functionality of an application under test. It is found as an effective method of suspecting glitches and bugs, by different high profile testers.

Look out for patterns - Software errors are inherently social in nature. They like to stay in groups. Most of the errors have their own unique nature, that makes them singular. Try to look for the patterns that software bugs follow. Jot down the test ideas which helped you in the past for the detection of bugs as past experiences prove to be very helpful.  

Work hard in the most hurtful place - When you encounter errors, don't panic and take it easy. This may just be a starting point, not the end! Don't race to log it into the bug/issue/defect tracker. 

Suspecting an error directs that there is a loose link in the software. Before coming across this error, the system may have entered an unstable state. Assume that the system is in a shaky state, it is recommended to abuse it more; provide more crazy input than ever; encourage gallon data entry; reduce available system resources; try to place it to the point where it may cause the application under test to crash. Who knows that you may soon experience the horrible face of early bugs! Once you suspect it, don’t skip to jot down all the details and check the repeatability before logging it into the tracker.

Hear the steps of an approaching bug! - A good tester must hear the hiss of an approaching bug! It’s not an exaggeration at all. One of the common practices of successful testers is that they wear a headset while hunting for bugs. This way testers are enabled to hear the various background sounds including the ding of a warning message or a buzz of several other messages. Moreover, it also aids in listening to the specific background sound of errors which usually don’t show up on the screen. 

Better a couple than single! - A most common statement is remarked about testers that they never run out of ideas. Well, this quality is a desirable one. Testers are humans too and are also prone to failures. Sometimes it’s possible that your test cases may not be able to uncover the bugs in the application or software. That’s the point where you need another tester to intervene. Request your fellow tester to come and test along with you. This helps in the generation of more and more test ideas and thus results in brilliant testing i.e 90% error detection. 

Conclusion

The practices we have described may work in your case but not in another because it might vary from context to context. Therefore it is recommended that the tester must know what sort of problems he is likely to encounter and then research or jot down different globally appreciated practices to hunt bugs.