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Proper Bug Hunting

Joel has a great piece which mentions the right approach to bug fighting:

For example, if I assign a bug to a developer I expect them to:
1. reproduce the bug
2. if it’s not immediately reproducible, make a good faith effort to figure out why it’s happening to me instead of just assuming that I’m doped up on anti-allergy medication and hallucinating it
3. find the root cause
4. do some searches to see if the same errors were made elsewhere in the code
5. fix them all
6. test the fix
7. think about whether this bug might be causing serious implications for a customer who needs to be told about the fix etc.

That’s the Rosh Gadol behavior. Possible Rosh Katan behaviors would be
1. resolved-not-repro. You can always get away with this once without even trying to repro the bug, because later you can pretend you didn’t understand the bug report.
2. without even reproing the bug, make a change to the source code that seems like it would fix it and resolve it as fixed. If it wasn’t, I’ll catch it when I close the bug, right? And if it’s really still broken, surely another tester will find it.

Rosh Gadol of course is quite the opposite: taking initiative and doing what is desired, not what is requested.

Tags: bug, business, development —

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