How to Manage the Process of Defect Management

What is Bug / Defect?

A bug/defect is an error in Software application which produce and incorrect or unexpected result

While executing testcases, a tester may find that some test results are contradictory to Expected behaviour. This deviation in test result is known as Software defect, Bugs, or incidents.

In this blog, you will learn-

• Bug Report
• Defect Management Lifecycle
  • Discovery
  • Categorization
  • Resolution
  • Verification
  • Closure
  • Reporting
• Important Defect Metrics

Bug Report

While reporting a bug, the tester should include the following information in Bug Report.

Please go through the Bug Life Cycle.

• Bug ID – Unique identification number for the bug.
• Bug Description – Provide a detailed description of the bug, including the module, build, and other relevant information in which the bug was found.
• Version – Specify the version of the application in which the bug was found.
• Steps – Detailed steps to replicate the bug with screenshots
• Date Raised – Date when the bug was reported
• Reference– reference document like Testcase, SRS which can help in understanding the bug
• Detected By – Name/ID of the tester who reported the bug
• Status – Status of the bug
• Assignee– Name/ID of the developer who will fix the bug
• Severity – Impact of the defect on the application
• Priority – Bug fixing urgency.

Severity/ Priority can be High/Medium/Low based on the effect/ importance at which the bug should be Fixed respectively

What is Defect Management Process?

Defect management is the process of identifying and fixing bugs. The defect management process contains the below stages:

1. Discovery of Bug
2. Bug Categorization
3. Bug Fix
4. Bug Verification
5. Bug Closure
6. Bug Reports

Let us explain each stage one by one:

Discovery of Bug

In the discovery stage, the project teams must discover as many bugs as possible, before the end customer can find it. Developers accept a bug and change its status to “accepted” when they discover it.

Bug Categorization

The bug categorisation helps the developers to prioritise their tasks. That means that this kind of categorisation helps the developers in fixing the bugs first that are more important.

Below are the various Categories of a bug:

• Critical: We need to resolve the bugs immediately as they may damage the product.
• High: Product main features are not working
• Medium: Minor discrepancy in the product Requirements
• Low: Very Minor impact on product Operation

The Test Manager usually performs bug categorization.

Resolution

Once the bugs are accepted and categorized, developers follow the below steps to fix the Bug. 

• Assignment: Assigned to a developer to fix and changed the status to Responding.
• Schedule fixing: Developers create a schedule to fix bugs depend on the Bug priority.
• Fix the defect: While the development team fix the bugs, the QA Manager tracks the process of fixing defect compare to the above schedule.
• Report the resolution: Request a report of the resolution from the developers when they fix bugs.

Verification

Once the development team fixes the bugs, the testing team verifies that the bugs are resolved.

Closure

Once the development team resolves and verifies a bug, they mark it as “closed.” If not, then QA Reassign it to the development team and mark the bug as Reopened.

Reporting

In this phase, we create the report which contains the current bug situation and share it with management to get feedback from them.

How to evaluate the quality of the test execution?

This is a question which every QA Manager wants to know. There are 2 parameters which you can consider as following

• Defect Rejection Ratio= (Number of Defects Rejected /Total Number of Defects) *100
• Defect Leakage Ratio= (Number of Defects Missed/Total Defects in application) *100
• The lower value of DRR and DLR, the better quality of test execution.
• We can reduce these Ratios by following Measures:
  • Improve the skills of the tester.
  • Spend more time on Test execution, especially in reviewing the test execution results.

Below are some of the important blogs for reference:

https://softwaretestingleaders.com/agile-vs-waterfall-know-the-difference-between-methodologies/

https://softwaretestingleaders.com/adhoc-testing-in-software/

http://www.csueastbay.edu

https://www.softwaretestingleaders.com/