How to get all your Bugs resolved without any ‘Invalid Bug’ label?

Do we all hate the “Invalid bug” label from our developers for the bugs reported by us? I think every tester should try to get his/her 100% bugs resolved. This requires bug reporting skills.

Take a look at our previous post on “How to write a good Bug Report? Tips and Tricks” to report bugs professionally and without any ambiguity.

The main reason for the bug being marked as invalid is due to “insufficient troubleshooting” by the tester before reporting the bug.

In this tutorial, we will focus only on troubleshooting to find the main cause of the bug. Troubleshooting will help you decide whether the ambiguity you           find in your application under test is really a bug or any test setup mistake.

Yes, 50% of the bugs get marked as “invalid bugs” only due to the testers incomplete testing setup. Let’s say you found ambiguity in an application under test. You are now preparing the steps to report this ambiguity as a bug.

But wait! Have you done enough troubleshooting before reporting this bug? Or have you confirmed if it is really a bug?

Troubleshooting to be Performed Before Reporting Any Bug

Troubleshooting for:

• What’s not working?
• Why is it not working?
• How can you make it work?
• What are the possible reasons for the failure?

The answer to the first question “What’s not working?” is sufficient for you to report the bug steps in the bug tracking system. Then why should you answer the remaining three questions? Think beyond your responsibilities. Act smarter, don’t be a dumb person who only follows his routine steps and don’t even think outside of that.

You should be able to suggest all possible solutions to resolve the bug and efficiency as well as drawbacks of each solution. This will increase your respect in the team and will also reduce the possibility of getting your bugs rejected, not due to this respect but due to your troubleshooting skills.

Before reporting any bug, make sure that it isn’t your mistake while testing, you have missed an important flag to set or you might not have configured your test setup properly.

Troubleshoot the reasons for the failure in the application. On proper troubleshooting, report the bug. We have compiled a troubleshooting list. Check to see the different reasons for failure.

Reasons for Failure

#1) If you are using any configuration file for testing your application then make sure that this file is up to date as per the application requirements. Many times some global configuration file is used to pick or set some application flags.

Failure to maintain this file as per your software requirements will lead to malfunctioning of your application under test. You can’t report it as a bug.

#2) Check if your Database is proper: Missing table might be the main reason that your application will not work properly. A classic example of this: One of my projects was querying many monthly user database tables to show the user reports.

First table existence was checked in the master table (This table was maintaining only monthly table names) and then data was queried from different individual monthly tables. Many testers were selecting a big date range to see the user reports.

But many times it was crashing the application as those tables were not present in the database of test machine server, it was giving SQL query error and they were reporting it as a bug which subsequently was getting marked as invalid by developers.

#3) If you are working on Automation Testing project then debug your script twice before coming to the conclusion that the application failure is a bug.

#4) Check if you are not using invalid access credentials for authentication.

#5) Check if software versions are compatible.

#6) Check if there are any other hardware issues that are not related to your application.

#7) Make sure your application hardware and software prerequisites are correct.

#8 ) Check if all software components are installed properly on your test machine. Check whether the registry entries are valid.

#9) For any failure, look into the ‘system event viewer’ for details. You can trace out many failure reasons from the system event log file.

#10) Before starting the test, make sure that you have uploaded all the latest version files to your test environment.

Conclusion

These are all small and common mistakes but can have a major impact on your relations and credibility in your team.

When you find that your bug is marked as invalid and the invalid bug reason is from the above-mentioned list – it will be a silly mistake and it will definitely hurt you. (At least to me!)

Share the mistakes done by you while reporting any bug. This will help other readers to learn from your experience!

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