Bug Tracking – What is it?
A bug is an error or fault in a computer program that causes it to behave in an incorrect way or produce an unexpected result. Most bugs surface from mistakes made in a program’s source code or components and operating systems used by such programs. Bugs trigger errors that may have damaging effects; it may cause the program to crash and leads to a huge amount lost in revenue.
Bug tracking is the process of monitoring, capturing, reporting and managing software problems and resolutions. The aim of bug tracking is to maintain high product quality; a good bug tracking process will neutralize the damaging effect caused by bugs.
Bug life cycle
Bug Lifecycle is the particular set of states a bug goes through during its lifetime from discovery to defect fixation. It is directed by the software testing process and depends upon the tools used. The steps involve in the bug tracking process includes:
Discovery
The first phase of the bug tracking process is the discovery phase. The project team has to discover as many bugs as possible before the end customer. A bug found and accepted by the developers will have its status changed to “Accepted.”
Bug Triage
Bug triage is a process where bug issues are evaluated and prioritized. It ensures all reported issues are appropriately managed. Priority and severity are defined for the bugs. The aim of Triage is to assess, prioritize and assign resolution to bugs.
Severity
Severity is the effect the bug has on system operation. The impact may be data loss, financial loss or wasted time. Severity levels are not standardized but are classify by critical, high, medium and low.
Priority
Priority controls where a bug falls on the list of planned changes. It is classified by “immediate,” “high,” “medium” and “low.” Priority helps the developers in fixing bugs first that are highly crucial.
Resolution
Once the bugs are categorized, the following steps are followed to fix the bug.
- Assign a developer or technician to fix the bug and changed the status to Responding.
- Create a schedule to fix these bugs, depending on their priority.
- Fix the bug.
Verification
After the development team fixed the bug, the testing team verifies that the bugs are actually resolved, and it assigns the status “Fixed” to it.
You can read more about Manual Testing or about Test management tools in here