Troubleshooting- Before Reporting any bug?

Troubleshooting of:

·                     What’s not working?

·                     Why it’s not working?

·                     How can you make it work?

·                     What are the possible reasons for the failure?

Answer for the first question “what’s not working?” is sufficient for you to report the bug steps in bug tracking system. Then why to answer remaining three questions? Think beyond your responsibilities. Act smarter, don’t be a dumb person who only follow his routine steps and don’t even think outside of that. You should be able to suggest all possible solutions to resolve the bug and efficiency as well as drawbacks of each solution. This will increase your respect in your team and will also reduce the possibility of getting your bugs rejected, not due to this respect but due to your troubleshooting skill.

Before reporting any bug, make sure it isn’t your mistake while testing, you have missed any important flag to set or you might have not configured your test setup properly.

Troubleshoot the reasons for the failure in application. On proper troubleshooting report the bug. I have complied a troubleshooting list. Check it out - what can be different reasons for failure.

Reasons of failure:
1) If you are using any configuration file for testing your application then make sure this file is up to date as per the application requirements: Many times some global configuration file is used to pick or set some application flags. Failure to maintain this file as per your software requirements will lead to malfunctioning of your application under test. You can’t report it as bug.

2) Check if your database is proper: Missing table is main reason that your application will not work properly.
I have a classic example for this: One of my projects was querying many monthly user database tables for showing the user reports. First table existence was checked in master table (This table was maintaining only monthly table names) and then data was queried from different individual monthly tables. Many testers were selecting big date range to see the user reports. But many times it was crashing the application as those tables were not present in database of test machine server, giving SQL query error and they were reporting it as bug which subsequently was getting marked as invalid by developers.

3) If you are working on automation testing project then debug your script twice before coming to conclusion that the application failure is a bug.

4) Check if you are not using invalid access credentials for authentication.

5) Check if software versions are compatible.

6) Check if there is any other hardware issue that is not related to your application.

7) Make sure your application hardware and software prerequisites are correct.

8) Check if all software components are installed properly on your test machine. Check whether registry entries are valid.

9) For any failure look into ‘system event viewer’ for details. You can trace out many failure reasons from system event log file.

10) Before starting to test make sure you have uploaded all latest version files to your test environment.