Links to bug reporting techniques, tips and tools
One bugtracking system that has popped up since I was last posting here is Canonical’s Launchpad.
In mid-2006 James Henstridge talks about Launchpad in the context of it being considered as a bug tracker for Python (note that Python eventually chose Jira and then switched to Roundup). You can also check the more recent Feature Guide to Launchpad.
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Jeff Waugh wants to report bad search results to Google, but where? His commenters have some good suggestions:
Scott Says:
June 17th, 2007 at 18:49Perhaps you have to be logged in to get this form?
["Dissatisfied with your search results?" form]
Willem Says:
June 17th, 2007 at 20:48Or bether yet (with some googling
)
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Terence M. Colligan writes:
Although I thought I understood the importance of quality, and took pride in the quality of the software we produced, I never believed that delivering defect-free software was possible. After all, everyone knows that all software has lots of bugs, right?
Well, no, not necessarily! Certainly, most experiences with today’s software quality are not encouraging. Although few people can name even one piece of software which they use that has no bugs, defect-free software is possible to create. We know it is possible, because we’re doing it.
It started with a single engineer. This engineer was consistently producing work with a defect rate more than one hundred times smaller than our other engineers. She has done so for us for over three years now. During the same time, she has produced three to five times as much code as any other engineer.
I found this so exciting that I determined to find out how she did it, and to see if we could teach our other engineers to achieve the same quality results.
Via James Gregory, Defect-free code.
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James Gregory reviews how to check for resource pressure bugs.
A quick one for today, sparked by recent events at work. It can pretty much be summed up in this even quicker question: do you know what your program does when it’s out of resources? Out of RAM, out of disk-space, out of address-space, out of time? Computers are indeed powerful beasts these days, and there’s a bunch of people who would like you to believe that they are effectively infinitely powerful, but observing your code working with limited resources, even if those limitations are artificially imposed, can tell you a lot of things you mightn’t have known previously.
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Scott Berkun’s Project Manager clinic discussion group had a look at the politics of bug fixing in September 2005:
I quickly realized that my team wasn’t prioritizing for itself – but was prioritizing bugs around management and other perceptions of how other people in the organization would *force* us to prioritize bugs. So in essence my development team wanted to make pre-emptive political choices when it came to bug fixing. Any advice for making this process less frustrating?
Responses review the standard way to prioritise bug fixes.
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