June 24, 2010

Advise for bug hunters


We organized a bug hunt for our latest release, inviting developers, PMs, pre-sales, tech writers and IT people to test with us in short fun sessions.

I wrote these tips for the non-testers - see if you want to add something:

A few tips on how to be successful in bug hunting, collected from veteran hunters:

Be pessimistic, but energetic

you know that everything that can go wrong WILL go wrong, but you do it anyway (and report it)

2. Don’t look for bugs under the street-light

go for the less travelled paths

3. Think negative

The positive paths are working

4. Size matters

Go for big inputs (files, compliance content, number of jobs in workflow, etc.)

5. Do it again, and again

Jobs will run the first time, but the second time?

Create, Delete, Re-create – BOOM!

6. Be quick, but thorough

Use existing resources (user guide, SDD) for quick checklists

Good luck


Picture by http://www.flickr.com/photos/slmatthews