Where Are The BUGS?

What we need to know and what we need to have for finding bugs in product? In this article we’ll try to cover these questions.

To find bugs, we need to cover the product first. We need to know the product very well, starting from all its functions to what issues it is going to solve, who are its users and how they are going to use it. To cover the product successfully, we need to model it first. To test the product, we need models of testing as well. As Michael Bolton mentioned in his articles, “Testing against requirements is all about modeling.”

Lets try to build our model for a system, where valid login criteria are provided. We know, that login should be numeric, 4 digit long any number. The first method would be inputting any number between 1000-9999. This method is called simplified model of testing.

We need to remember that Testing is about right questioning!

As software testers we need to start giving questions, because we don’t know anything about product, so we need to know what this system is doing?

One of the questions should be “What if we input number not in a range of 1000-9999? How will the system react to an input outside 1000-9999? Should the system stop? Should it show an error? Should it give some hint to the user?
Lastly, what if we login inputting a number from 1000-9999 range?

We also need to know what actions should the system perform when it starts. Does it need to open a welcome page? How can the user understand that system started working? What’s the risk of using the system? How long can the user use the system with one time start?  What should happen when we stop the system and run again? Does the system need any time to get to the state for it to be used?

We can find a lot of questions to ask for helping us discover all the aspects of the system and these questions will allow us to find bugs in the system. Questions help us to understand whether we have truly found a bug or not.