Organizations are adopting Agile methodologies for the software development process, however, it can be a tricky process. The concepts of agile are different due to which they can be difficult to understand and relate to concrete concepts like time, number of testers, and cost. However, to deal with software bugs in an agile environment is difficult given the very nature of the bugs.
What is a Bug?
Let us first define a bug. A bug is a malfunction in an application, a specific feature performs incorrectly given some preconditions. A bug is unexpected. Once developers have programmed a piece of software to perform a task, and they believe it works perfectly fine until a tester discovers certain conditions in which it doesn’t work as expected. This is why QA teams use bug management tools to identify and detect these bugs in the early stage of the development phases.
Generally, there are two types of bugs; progression and regression. Those bugs that are logged against new features or functionality are known as progression bugs. These bugs can be caused due to a lack of understanding of a feature or bad code. On the other hand, regression bugs are introduced in existing features that previously worked as per specifications. These types of bugs may have been created as a side effect of other work, developers may not always know all the consequences of changing things in code, depending on the complexity of a product and every change represents some risk of introducing these bugs. These bugs can be detected, recorded, and rectified with the help of the right bug management tools.
The Issue and How to Resolve it
A good engineering methodology ensures that before developing a solution, testers exhaustively identify and define the problems. Here, the problem is how to account for bugs within an agile environment. Problems arise due to the very nature of the bugs and these bugs represent that there was a problem in the understanding of how a feature or existing product works. It is nearly impossible to predict the complexity of a bug due to which estimating bug-fixing and tracking the velocity becomes problematic.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for software development problems. But if developers reserve some predetermined capacity for fixing bugs in every sprint, it can save the day. This can work both ways. If testers are working on bug estimation, they can maintain separate capacities for feature work vs bug fixing work. In case, testers are not estimating bugs, they will simply lower the overall capacity by whatever percentage of the spring they want to spend fixing bugs. This will make their jobs easier. Bug handling can be a daunting task. But when QA managers and their respective teams are equipped with bug management tools, they can achieve success. It also helps them ensure that the same bugs do not appear in the app repeatedly so that they can ensure software quality and deliver on time.
Kualitee 