Best Practices for Bug Hunting and Tracking

Software development is a complicated process as it involves five different stages: designing, coding, testing, and maintenance. Among these, testing is the most challenging phase, which is performed by QAs. Quality Assurance plays a crucial role in software development. They not only help in delivering a high-quality product but also understand your user base closely. QAs performs a variety of tests to ensure that the application is working as expected before introducing it to the market.

One of the most difficult tasks for QAs while testing a web app is tracking and eliminating bugs. No matter how perfectly developers build a web app, bugs are always inevitable in every software development process. Software bugs are the flaws or failures in the code that prevent an app from performing as expected.

In this article, we will highlight some of these bugs and what you can do to prevent or eliminate them.

Types of Bugs in Application Development

Bugs can take place in an application for various reasons, such as mistakes in coding, error in designing, etc. Some of the most common bugs that most testers find are:

Invalid Fields

If you’ve entered invalid characters into the validation fields of your web app, then these types of bugs take place. These bugs frequently occur in web applications, but they are not given a major priority because they are not that severe. But, sometimes these bugs can be the end of your web application if you don’t enter the valid characters on time.

Browser Compatibility

Most testers might be aware of this issue. Browser compatibility issues occur when your web app is not compatible with different browsers, which means it provides a different user interface on different browsers or doesn’t function properly on every browser, OS, or device. Browser compatibility is one of the major concerns for most businesses, and it’s the responsibility of QA team to test web app across all possible combination of browsers.

Testers often find it difficult to test a web app across an older version of browsers. So, to deal with this issue, they can test their web app with online Selenium Grid that allows you to test a web app across more than 2000 browser, OS, and devices.

Page Layout on Different Screen Resolutions

To run a web app successfully, it is necessary to know your user base and what device or platform they use to access your website. It is often found that most apps have a different page layout on different devices. Though it doesn’t create many problems in web app functionality, it can affect user experience. So, it’s crucial to know how your users are accessing your web app and then perform the test accordingly.

Date Control

It is often seen that many web apps use age restrictions like dating sites. These types of web apps have uncovered bugs related to date control that are commonly found in the registration forms or user editing forms. Such bugs often create problems when a new user wants to register with your web app. Usually, QA applies boundary value analysis so that they can have better test coverage to eliminate the bugs.

End-User Communication Error

If you’re not creating a user-friendly web app, then you’re creating problems for the end-user to use your web app. For instance, if users are not able to find what they are looking for, then they are likely to abandon your website and move to another one. So, you need to make sure that everything is in order, especially the navigation menu and search bar.

These are just some of the common bugs found in almost every web application. However, there can be other bugs as well based on your product.

Tips to Track and Hunt Bugs

After knowing the above bugs, you might be curious to know how to track and eliminate them. Well, experienced and skilled testers might already know how to track most of these bugs and fix them. Those who don’t have strong knowledge of how to find bugs can refer to the below strategy.

By having a strategy in mind, you can easily track and hunt bugs in your web application. But, a successful strategy requires proper planning, management, and discipline.

Test at Every Stage of Development

It is a proven fact that bugs can be tracked easily in the early stages of the development process. So, you must test your web app at every stage of the development process. For instance, unit testing and functional testing must be performed regularly throughout the project development. When you track bugs at the early stages, it also becomes helpful for the developers to fix them quickly.

Prioritize Bug Fixing

It’s not necessary that you find a bug, and then you ask the developer to eliminate it as soon as possible. As a QA or developer, you should have a plan in place for when and how to fix bugs. However, there will be some bugs that need to be fixed immediately for additional changes. The development team should know how they are prioritizing bugs to meet the deadlines. Also, don’t try to save every bug in the bug-tracking report; some bugs might require immediate action to eliminate them.

Take Help From Bug Tracking Tool

A bug tracking tool helps in tracking, reporting, and managing bugs more quickly, so it’s always great to have an efficient bug tracking tool in hand. It not only saves time for the testers but also improves the software quality assurance. For example, if you are performing cross browser testing of the web app, then LambdaTest can help you track all the possible bugs while testing your web app.

Write Unit Tests

One of the simplest practices to track and hunt bugs is writing unit test. It not only helps the developers but also allows you to test code frequently and prevent regression bugs. Unit tests run the code one piece at a time and check the API to validate the requirements of your web app. They verify the accuracy of each unit to reduce defects in newly developed features.

Proper Communication

The most important part of tracking and hunting bugs is communication – it is the key element when it comes to keeping a product tidy and simple. The development team must understand the requirements and key points of the web application. Also, they must communicate with other team members if they’re facing any problem in fixing a bug.

In general, it is impossible to prevent all the bugs from happening, but the number of bugs can be reduced by applying unit tests, pair programming, and code reviews.

Conclusion

As your product grows, the chances of bugs also increase with it. Therefore, tracking and hunting bugs in every web application is very crucial because a common defect can cause significant problems for users to access your website. Above mentioned are some of the best practices that can be used to track and hunt bugs in your web app.