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.

Reference Materials:

• Videos
  • SLIDES
  • Bug advocacy video 1 [35:00] (nature of quality)
  • Bug Advocacy Video 2 [27:16] (Replicate bugs)
  • Bug Advocacy Video 3 [17:00] -- investigate bugs
  • Bug Advocacy 4 [12:00] (Dealing with objections)
  • Bug Advocacy 5 [20:43] (Psychological issues)
  • Bug Advocacy 6 [28:59] (Reporting style)

  [On some browsers, clicking on a video link to play the video will not work. To play the video, download it to your disk and play the downloaded copy with Windows Media Player 9 or later.]

• Readings
• Please read Chapter 4 in Kaner, Bach & Pettichord's Lessons Learned in Software Testing.

Activities and Assessments:

• Review / drill questions -- Please take the multiple-choice test available from the main moodle screen
• Activity: What's a bug?
• Activity: Signing onto the bug tracking system
• Activity: Replicating a reproducible bug (classroom discussion)

Assignment:

• Assignment: Replicate and Edit Bugs

Summary of the Learning Unit

Key aspects of the content of this section 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 reports

Our learning objectives include this content, plus improving your abilities / skills to:

• evaluate bug reports written by others
• revise / strengthen reports written by others
• write more persuasively (considering the interests and concerns of your audience)
• participate effectively in a multiphase, multi-person workgroup project