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Standards for Bug Severities?
MythoBeast asks: "While attempting to determine just how far a (unnamed) company's software is from releasability, a group that I belong to discovered that they consider a piece of software releasable with numerous 'severity one' bugs. This seems outright heinous to us at first, but then the conversation devolved into an argument of what constituted a 'severity one' bug. Is there a standard for such things? Is there a standard for how many of these things are reasonable for 'releasable' software?"
I have seen this in my company. There is no conspiracy against the customers. Usually I have detected two reasons for these kinds of semantic disputes:
(Sorry. Anonymous this time.)
If you are playing tetris on a computer controlling your life support system, and every time you get a green piece tetris pauses briefly and the CO2 filter shuts off so you suffocate Tetris has a Severity 4 or 5 bug.
Hoo boy, we used to get into this argument everytime we reached the "triage" portion of the project (typically after second beta or 3 months before ship, whichever came later).
Sev1 bugs: cause loss of data, hardware damage, or take down other programs (or the OS) which might cause loss of data.
Sev2 bugs: cause the program to crash without losing data, or otherwise make some feature non-functional
Sev3 bugs: impair the usefullness of some feature
Sev4 bugs: are cosmetic or may cause some confusion to the user (wrong status text, spelling errors, etc)
HOWEVER, there is also a priority scale. A Sev1 bug is not necessarily a Pri-1 bug, if it only occurs under extremely obscure conditions. Eg, if your program crashes, losing data, when a PC-Card is inserted, that's a Sev-1 bug. If it occurs any time any PC-card is inserted, then it's a Pri-1 bug. But if it's only one particular kind of PC-Card that exists in the wild in quantities of, say, a couple of hundred, then it's not a Pri-1 bug even though it's still a Sev-1 bug (you may still choose to fix the bug, but other Sev-1 bugs have priority since you can doc around this one). On the other hand, a low severity bug that's in your face every time you use the product is probably a fairly high-priority bug.
If you're running your business as a business, you will ship with bugs. If your product has a broad market, you will probably ship with a couple of Sev-1 bugs. (This sounds paradoxical, but consider -- the broader your market, the larger the number of permutations of hardware and software your product is going to inderact with, and the higher the chance some obscure situation will occur in which a Sev1 rears its head). It's a business decision to ship, so the number of bugs you ship with has to be based on more than just a technical analysis (Rule #1 of software development: shipping is a feature too).
It's easy for us technical heads to get on a high and mighty horse about quality and not shipping with bugs. But we tend to forget that what we're doing is NOT engineering (it's a lot closer to handicrafts in the days of guilds than it is to engineering the way it is done with bridges and aircraft). And we're not the people trying to run a business.
The corporate-wide standard in this case was badly broken, and was obviously written by someone who doenst understand software release.
QA is NOT there to find, log, and force a fix for every single bug in the system. That is an impossibiliy. Just like manufacturing QA, Software QA is a statistical processes.
The classic manufacturing QA example is the Bolt Building Machine. It makes bolts from metal bar at the rate of 10000 a day. It would be wonderful if manufacturing QA could take each one of the bolts produced by the machine and measure the eight or so critical bolt dimentions to ensure that each bolt was within tolerance. Unfortunatly, it takes about 15 minutes to measure a single bolt with that kind of precision, so it is not cost effective to measure each and every bolt. The next best way to ensure quality is to take a random sample of bolts and measure them, so that you can be statistically certain to an acceptable degree that the rest of the bolts are good.
Software QA works the same way. When a new release of software comes out, it is rarely run against the entire QA testplan again. This is especially true with patch releases where the development team believes that only a few minor things have changed. It just takes too long to run a full QA cycle against a build like that-- it is possible, but it isnt cost effective. Instead, the QA team runs a subset of the test plan against the build in an effort to sample the test space and come up with a statistical certainty that this release of the product isnt broken.
Bug classification is also a statistical problem equivilent to the classic 'expected value' problem. The standard five bug classifications are useful measures of the 'weight' of a problem. They answer the question, 'If this bug happens, how much does it hurt?' What the abovementioned corporate scheme failed to qualify was the 'How often it happens' part. Without knowing the frequency that the problem occurs, it is impossible to calculate the 'expected hurt' that the problem will generate.
Here is a degenerate case example. Say the program has code like this:
If a user directs a cosmic ray into the computer that corrupts the value of pointer between the time its validity is checked and the time it is dereferenced, the program will crash with severity 1. There is no workaround, because every time the user sends in this ray, the program fails. According to the abovementioned corporate policy, the product cant release until this problem is fixed, period.
What are the odds of a user here on earth actually sending in that cosmic ray at exactly the right time, let alone having a need to? Very close to zero. So close in fact, that it practically doesnt matter how severe the crash is. The 'expected hurt' from this problem is going to be very low, and the product should ship with that severity 1 bug going unfixed. If the software was going into space where cosmic rays are common, it might be prudent to recalculate the odds of the problem happening before shipping the code-- and maybe then the only practical solution is to ship with the bug but send up redundant systems.
QA is not there to ensure that the product has no bugs. QA is there to qualifiy risks, and to assure that the quality of the product falls within a certain tolerance. In a perfect universe, software would never have bugs, and bolts would never bend. Here in our solar system though, it all boils down to risk management.
A. Coward, (a QA Manager for a fortune 50)
The standard for how buggy a piece of software may be and still be releasable is the market. If people will buy your product in sufficient numbers for the project to be profitable, there were sufficiently few bugs at release time. This is also known as the Microsoft Lemma, as a reminder of the folks who lowered the bar for everyone.
Posted without attribution again, as usual. Sigh.
Umm.... no. Say I have this bug, X. If bug X triggers a BSOD when I'm surfing the Web, it is a level 4 or 5. If bug X triggers a BSOD when I'm trying to dock a space tourist, it's a level one. So, whether or not you have the intervening BSOD, you still have the problem the original poster described- the severity of bugs is completely situationally dependent. Of course, if your program is designed for an extremely specific task, then this type of listing is fine. But for any general purpose application (and more importantly, for any general purpose OS) this type of categorization is next to useless unless the categorization of the bug is closely tied to usage scenarios.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Show stoppers are usually bugs that crash the software when doing normal functions. Like if you open up a file and the software crashes, that would be a show stopper. In some cases it depends on your clients as well. If the client finds a bug they may deem it as necessary to be fixed. Most companies I have worked at usually work closely with clients. In many cases the software does not get FULLY tested till the client actually gets the software. Then when (not if they will find bugs) they tell us an dthen we make it a priority to fix them and send out patches to certain clients if not all. This would depend on the client contract.
"Low priority" bugs would be ones that do not impead functionality, but are more of annoyances. Take for instance I saw one bug that when you scroll the scrollbar the window would flicker. This is annoying, but does not prevent the user from using the software. Other less important bugs are bugs that are on reports. If a report does not show the correct data and you can get the data from the database or it is a known bug this can also be a low priority bug. The question usually is "Can the client work with the application with this bug or will it cause the client major problems or loss of money?" Take for instance the reports bug, a client could just not use the reports and create their own from sql.
Something you must remember is that some of the programs that I have worked on have been written by many programmers. They are thousands of files andhave client, server, and database code, in multiple languages. Some of these bugs could be caused by some of the software that we use. Bugs in windows API's, bugs in Sybase, or Oracle, bugs in the server OS, or even 'quirks' that many programmers do not know about.
Next, many times programmers get put in a job where they know the language but NOT the API and the API is not well documented, especially if this is a 'custom' system where the software company has developed programs for DB access on top of the 'db lib'. What about programmers that leave the company or get fired?
So who do you blame? The programmer that impemented something that he did not know the company API, the software company for not completely testing "EVERY" single case that could possibly come up?
You never know how a user will use software or what they may do or have installed on their system that could affect how your software will work.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Don't you mean:
1. The computer knows all.
2. The computer is always right.
3. The computer loves you.
6. The computer sees everything.
4. The computer is in connttrrolll.
9. The computer wants all good things.
14. The computer will make things all better.
2. The computer cannot be questioned.
4. The computer is above you.
7. The computer makes you, thinks.
Apologies to the creators of Paranoid.
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--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
BSOD is not a bug. BSOD is the result of some bug which could be classified according to the scales. Any number of problems, from severity 5 to severity 1 all trigger BSOD. (Note the BSOD is essentially an effort to convert severity 2 bugs to severity three, by giving the operator the option to continue. 'Course, it never works in real life that I've seen, but sometimes it works just well enough to save to a new file and try again.)
I've been in software testing for longer than I'd like to admit. I've never figured out how to classify bugs that are very annoying to the user (misspelled dialog box, say) and stupidly easy to fix. Unfortunately, most of the programmers I've worked with don't even LOOK at Sev2 and 3 bugs...only the showstoppers. Yes, they're bad programmers and they're breaking the process, but hey...I've got to get the job done, right?
Any suggestions, other than make EVERYTHING a Sev1 issue and making the whole process useless?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
as expounded by Watts S. Humphrey of SEI in "Managing the Software Process" (c) 1989, Addison-Wesley, p. 218:
"Severity 1: An error that prevents the accomplishment of an operational or mission-essential function, prevents the operator/user from performing a mission-essential function, or jeopardizes personnel safety.
Severity 2: An error that adversely affects the accomplishment of an operational or mission-essential function and for which no acceptable alternative workarounds are available.
Severity 3: An error that adversely affects the accomplishment of an operational or mission-essential function for which acceptable alternative workarounds are available.
Severity 4: An error that is an operator/user inconvenience and affects operational or mission-essential functions.
Severity 5: All other errors."
Any other questions?...
I once wrote a shrink wrap program for a nitch market that was the best selling in the nitch.
I can tell you about a (true) Sev 2 (or maybe sev 1, as the main part of the program didn't work) bug that was LOW priority
Way back when, HP made a card that went into you PC that accelerated your Laser Printer. What it did was offload any graphics processing from the printer to the PC - If I remember right, it was called a LaserDirect card
Well anyway, we found a bug after we shipped - The the client was running a PS2 Model 80, in a certain video mode, with this HP card, NO report printing worked, AT ALL. When you consider the main purpose of the app was to print these reports, it was fairly bad
The thing is, in the first 6 months the app was out there, we found ONE customer who hit that bug. We had a simple answer - we gave them their money back, and said, "Sorry"
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
A bug (in my development experience, limited though it is) has both a severity and a frequency. A sev 1 bug that rarely happens might not be as important as a sev 3 bug that is a frequent annoyance. We always eliminated all known Sev 0 bugs (crash server; yikes) but the occasional Sev 1 bug that was very hard to kill AND deemed unlikely to affect the customer was left in so we could release now and fixed in the SP or point release. Yes, leaving bugs in sucks but sometimes not shipping until they are all dead sucks more.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
How the did the above post get modded up to +4 interesting?
Logging bugs, and giving them "severities", is well and good. It can help in the same way that any effective software development tool helps, by enhancing communication. The moral is that bug tracking is useful only in the context of a team that can, and wishes to, use it effectively.
Wrong. Software engineering practices like tracking the severity and priority of bugs are aimed at creating higher quality software. Instead of developers spending time fixing bugs that are unimportant or not as annoying to the user, they have a way of categorizing and fixing bugs on a scale of importance.
Using bug count and severity as a measure of "releasability", however, is the fallacy of feeble-minded managers, who are afraid to make a decision without a number to back it up.
Yet people like you will bitch that Microsoft shouldn't release software with known severe bugs. I guess if they didn't track bugs they would be able to say they didn't know that there were any severe bugs with a clear conscience.
Software development (as practiced in all but epsilon of cases) is simply not a measurable process. You will only waste your time trying to quantify it.
Software development can be measured based on a large number of metrics. The fact that most people refuse to use software engineering practices that have been known for decades doesn't mean that the process is "immeasurable" it simply means our industry is full of people who'd rather subscribe to the myth that programming is an art instead of trying to make it an engineering discipline.
Releasability can only be determined by the judgement of the team working on the release (which may include developers, testers, release managers, beta testers, partners, etc). That is not to say that you should not draw upon the bug database for evidence upon which to base your judgement. But it requires intelligent interpretation, not counting up some totals.
So if the members of the team come up with the rules for what makes a bug a certain severity and what marks a bug as a certain priority exactly why can they not base releasability on these metrics? Quite frankly, waiting until the software "feels right" before releasing it is probably the most ridiculuos thing I've ever heard. On the other hand saying "we won't release until all the bugs that cause core dumps/segfaults/BSODs are fixed (severity one)" or that "we won't ship until we fix the annoying UI issues (priority one or two)" are quite reasonable even from a common sense point of view.
Some people consider this a failing of the software development process. I think they are too quick to condemn. The customer doesn't (usually) judge software by its bug count.
Interestingly most users of Windows 98 I know judged the software on its bug count (i.e. how many crashes needing reboots per day or other ridiculuos problems per day)
Most software is judged by an overall feel: if the software is compelling, many deficiencies will be overlooked. Further, it is difficult to guess ahead of time (even with beta testing) which bugs will really bite people and impede their use of the software.
If beta testers don't give you a feel for a large number of the bugs that will bite people on the ass then there are flaws in your beta-testing process.
Given the many interacting factors that determine the success of software, release decisions are naturally more art than science.
People like you are the major problem with the software industry. Those that believe that even though there have been increasing strides in the field of sooftware engineering, we should all still practice software development like it is a black art handed down from master to apprentice in a scene reminescent of guilds of the middle ages.
I know, I haven't presented any hard evidence. I'm arguing from experience in both free and closed software projects, and appealing to common sense. Most free software is released "when it's ready", without any metrics. Ponder on whether this is a strength or a weakness. And remember that when someone gives you number, the burden is on him to show that the number means something.
Do you really think Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, Apache, the Linux kernel, OpenBSD, etc are shipping "stable" releases of software without keeping an eye on bug severities and priorities? They may choose to ignore them for one reason or the other but they are keeping track.
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Because there is less urgency to release - developers release when they think it's ready, not when Marketing thinks it's ready.
However this can change when the developers start getting more pressure to release by a certain date.
Cheerio,
Link.
1 - This is a drop-everything-to-fix-this-immediately kind of bug. A bug that makes it impossible to use the software at all.
2 - This level of bug is very serious and prevents some major part of the program from working. If we were doing a word processor, it might be cut-and-paste doesn't work.
3 - This level of bug displays a runtime error to the user but if they accept the error, the functionality is still there. Everything works, more or less.
4 - This is a spelling error or a size-of-textbox problem, something which the end user will notice but which obviously works properly.
Our standards say we are never to release with a level 1 or level 2 bug and, as much as possible, no level 3 bugs. Ideally, of course, we release with no bugs but that can be rather difficult.
Under no circumstances would we ever release with a level 1 bug because this simply means our app is broken.
--
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
The excess of moderator points hasn't subsided.
Wrong. Software engineering practices like tracking the severity and priority of bugs are aimed at creating higher quality software. Instead of developers spending time fixing bugs that are unimportant or not as annoying to the user, they have a way of categorizing and fixing bugs on a scale of importance.
You're saying the same thing I said. Bug tracking helps communication. People know where the nasty problems are, and nothing falls through the cracks.
Yet people like you will bitch that Microsoft shouldn't release software with known severe bugs. I guess if they didn't track bugs they would be able to say they didn't know that there were any severe bugs with a clear conscience.
That must be the most common fallacy on Slashdot: that everyone here thinks the same thing. I myself understand very well that Microsoft's business requires them to release software with serious bugs. I also know that I have the choice of software developed under a better (for me, at least) model.
Programming is certainly not engineering. Why? The requirements are nowhere near well enough defined. And with the pace of the field, it's not worth anyone's time to define them to "engineering" precision. This is simply a fact at this stage of the game.
So if the members of the team come up with the rules for what makes a bug a certain severity and what marks a bug as a certain priority exactly why can they not base releasability on these metrics?
For the same reason that "the law is an ass", "metrics are an ass". Even if developed by reasonable people with good intentions. See below.
Quite frankly, waiting until the software "feels right" before releasing it is probably the most ridiculuos thing I've ever heard.
Where did you get the idea that I want to release software based on good vibes and burning entrails? Look, I'm saying that you use all the evidence that you have available. But you use it more in the manner of a historian arguing a thesis, not a mathematicial constructing a proof. These are different modes of thinking, but each is valid in its domain. Or do you think history is new age bullshit?
On the other hand saying "we won't release until all the bugs that cause core dumps/segfaults/BSODs are fixed (severity one)" or that "we won't ship until we fix the annoying UI issues (priority one or two)" are quite reasonable even from a common sense point of view.
Depends what you mean. If you mean, "We reviewed the bug db and the beta tester feedback, and everyone agrees that we can release when the four known crashes are fixed, barring unforseen new issues", then I'm with you. If you mean, "Welcome to the new project, team; we're going to ship when the feature-set is implemented and there are no sev 1 bugs", you're fooling yourself. There are just too many possibilities, and no bug database can objectively capture the complex reality of a software project. Any hope that metrics will guide you is (pardon the slang) just wanking.
Interestingly most users of Windows 98 I know judged the software on its bug count (i.e. how many crashes needing reboots per day or other ridiculuos problems per day)
Really? They don't care about the zillions of applications they can run? What proportion of Windows users quit using it because of the bugs? If it's not high, then bug count is probably not a significant factor in the success of Windows.
Do you really think Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, Apache, the Linux kernel, OpenBSD, etc are shipping "stable" releases of software without keeping an eye on bug severities and priorities?
The projects I follow most closely are Linux and Debian. Debian explicitly eschews specific release criteria based on hard experience. Linus has been known to release kernels that don't compile.
They may choose to ignore them for one reason or the other but they are keeping track.
Hear my point: bug databases are good because they assist in keeping track. Releasing based on a formula is bad. "Ignoring bugs for one reason or another" represents the practice I advocate: look at the evidence (including bug database), apply intelligence, draw conclusion.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Seems like a fairly simple sceme to me -
(I was a developer who moved into the testing area because my employers and peers found I had a knack for exposing weaknesses in a product. So let me draw on both sets of experiences to provide a "developer-oriented" answer to this question.)
The first goal of DVT/QA testing is to ensure that the product functions as the functional specification and documentation says it should.
That means DVT first tests each operation, each feature, and each option on each environment with a variety of recognized and accepted test data sets. Not only are DVT testers looking for proper operation with proper data, but also proper operation with bad data. In other words, do the error-catching routines actually catch errors? If there is a sequencing error, is it reported properly? Recovered from properly?In many DVT environments, the test conditions are required, to the best of the DVT system's ability, to test all of the code, using profiling and test coverage tools to indicate when each path has been checked.
Like development, design verification and test (DVT) and product quality assurance have as many levels of abstraction as your typical development effort. Properly structured testing looks at the major stuff first, options next, and then they go for the anomolies. Indeed, in the DVT efforts I have managed, the checkout of a software change required the "20-minute test", the "3-hour test", and the "24-hour test" before I would approve the change to be part of a release candidate subject to full regression testing. (From project to project, the actual length of time taken for each of these tests differed, but the names stuck.)
The second goal of DVT/QA testing is to find operational problems in-house before the customer finds them in the field.
This is the time when testers "bang on the product" to determine if there are any weaknesses or coupling effects. The best testing is when you have a good number of alpha testers that use the product in the manner it was intended to be used, followed by a good-sized group of beta testers. Beta test management is an art unto itself, with the most important function being the selection of the beta testers themselves. Some companies miss the boat by only soliciting one type of beta tester. The best beta programs court fringe users, those who would use the product in unusual ways, in order to ferret out more error conditions.Frankly, I find development easier to do than testing, but testing is to me the more satisfying activity...especially when my efforts expose some really funny cascades.
There is a third aspect to testing that doesn't get much play in companies: reproducing field problems. I have some war stories if someone serves up the beer...
This is probably a good time in this thread to throw out an allied problem: what happens when management doesn't like the results of the bug evaluation.
True story: a corporate-wide standard for bug determination was defined in a Fortune-50 corporation. In a project, though, the director of engineering decided that the standards "didn't reflect reality" -- or rather, that the numbers made him look bad. It also meant that there was no way he would be able to ship the product on time, because the number of ship-block bugs was just too high for his development staff to clear in a manner acceptible to him and to his superiors.
Now, the definition was pretty strict: Severity 1 bugs were features in the specification that were implemented and broken in significant ways, severity 2 were features in the specification that were implemented and met the operational requirements but not performance requirements, or were not implemented and marked in the specification as required for release, severity 3 were features that were implemented but broken in non-significant ways (cosmetics, usually) or features in the spec that were not implemented and marked as not required for current release, severity 4 were features that met spec but were identified as areas for improvement, and severity 5 were spec change requests. The rule is that the product MUST NOT ship with severity 1 bugs, SHOULD NOT ship with severity 2 bugs (release required a review and analysis of each S2 bug by corporate QA), MAY ship with severity 3 bugs, and MUST ship with priority 4 and 5 bugs.
So, Job One for this manager was to pull a Captain Kirk and change the rules. Severity 1 was redefined as "causing a system crash". Severity 2 was redefined to "causing an operation failure that does not result in a system crash". Severity 3 was everything else that used to be in S1 and S2, as well as what was originall in S3. That meant that missing or severely broken features identified as required for release obtained an S3 rating instead of the original S1 or S2 rating. Or, in other words, a broken product could now be shipped!
Of course, it didn't do very well in the market, but the manager in question still got his raise -- and I suspect that's all he cared about.
The root cause of this breakdown was that QA/DVT was an Engineering function, not a separate function. The guy saying "no" should be a peer to the guy saying "yes". (It would have helped if the original bug definitions would have been part of the specification, because the spec is king within this company -- but that didn't happen.)
...would seem to apply.
"In everything do to others as you would have them do to you..." -- Matthew 7:12, NRS TranslationA generally good philosophy, regardless of your adherence to ceratin world religions.
When releasing software, I ask myself: Would I be pleased if somebody gave/sold this program to me? It isn't so much a matter of numbering conventions of bug severities -- it's a matter of pride and responsibility.
--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
All about me
Fixing bugs has a cost associated with it (e.g. QA employee's salaries, test beds, test software, time required to perform tests.)
NOT fixing bugs has a cost associated with it (tech support staff, development staff's time and resources required to fix the bugs, testing the fixes, the cost of packaging and shipping fixes, loss of repeat sales, bad press.)
The question for a commercial software vendor, then, is this:
NOTE: How the costs are perceived seems to depend somewhat on the size of the operation and the nature of the product. Here are some examples from my experience:
I view testing and bug severity/priority/frequency assessments as a means to help management make an informed decision as to when software is ready to ship.
It is their responsibility to know the market, to know the business decisions as to when fixing bugs costs more than leaving them in. It is my job to use the best practices and tools that I know how to help provide them the information they need. In short: their expertise is in the business side; mine (as a QA professional) is in the technical side.
Lastly, 1*1000 = 1000*1; one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day, but getting bit by a thousand mosquitos can ruin it, too... don't ignore the minor bugs! (Besides, what may appear to be cosmetic bugs can make it incredibly difficult to develop and maintain automated tests that depend on field prompts and error messages!)
As one of my CS professors likes to say - Software Kills People. Therefore, you should treat all the bugs in your software accordingly.
An OS that crashes on a PC at home may not be that big of a deal to you, but if that OS is installed on a machine that's powering a space station and the lives of the crew depend on it, then you'll probably be a little more concerned about the bugs in that environment.
Despite the popular belief, it is possible to write software that is completely free of bugs (just look at the space shuttle launching code). It is a lot more difficult to do that, sure, but nevertheless quite doable.
That's a bit of an oversimplification (unless you are making the tautological argument that a Sev1 bug is one that makes the software unreleasable - a reasonable position but not much help in deciding when the software is releasable).
The essential question is: is the software, with the bug, still more valuable than no software at all? If so, it's better to release it than not. I can deliver software with zero defects in infinite time and at infinite cost. Most users are willing to accept some non-zero defect rate in exchange for non-infinite cost and delivery sooner rather than later - and this is a value tradeoff that the user must make.
Among the factors to consider:
Bottom line: Listen to your customers, not engineering religion.
I also want the criteria for a standard for what alpha and beta versions are.
:-))
alpha Not all the features / business cases are part of the code. The developers are still adding them.. The code may be unstable, that is crashes for no reason. May contain bugs that trash files. This level should never reach testers who cannot recover their hard drives.
beta All features coded. The application runs OK. Outside testers (outside the development group) are asked to test it. After a while a public beta may be used where people outside the company may try it.
This is the traditional way of separating the two. Of course recently some companies have passed off alpha level as beta, the beta level as release. But that's another story
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
1."Show Stopper." The client absolutely refuses to sign-off on the project until this issue is solved.
2. "Mickey Mouse." Very minor error that can usually take a minute or two to fix, but wastes more of your time in the error reporting, documentation, and follow-ups.
3. "Ghost." Only the client sees it but can't replicate it or give you instructions so you can do that. The error is real (the client will send you a screen capture), but they can't helo you in recreating it.
Pedro
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Complete List of Windows 95 Error Messages
.TMP files all over the place
WinErr: 001 Windows loaded - System in danger
WinErr: 002 No Error - Yet
WinErr: 003 Dynamic linking error - Your mistake is now in every file
WinErr: 004 Erroneous error - Nothing is wrong
WinErr: 005 Multitasking attempted - System confused
WinErr: 006 Malicious error - Desqview found on drive
WinErr: 007 System price error - Inadequate money spent on hardware
WinErr: 008 Broken window - Watch out for glass fragments
WinErr: 009 Horrible bug encountered - God knows what has happened
WinErr: 00A Promotional literature overflow - Mailbox full
WinErr: 00B Inadequate disk space - Free at least 50MB
WinErr: 00C Memory hog error - More Ram needed. More! More! More!
WinErr: 00D Window closed - Do not look outside
WinErr: 00E Window open - Do not look inside
WinErr: 00F Unexplained error - Please tell us how this happened
WinErr: 010 Reserved for future mistakes by our developers
WinErr: 013 Unexpected error - Huh ?
WinErr: 014 Keyboard locked - Try anything you can think of.
WinErr: 018 Unrecoverable error - System has been destroyed. Buy a new one. Old Windows licence is not valid anymore.
WinErr: 019 User error - Not our fault. Is Not! Is Not!
WinErr: 01A Operating system overwritten - Please reinstall all your software. We are terribly sorry.
WinErr: 01B Illegal error - You are not allowed to get this error. Next time you will get a penalty for that.
WinErr: 01C Uncertainty error - Uncertainty may be inadequate.
WinErr: 01D System crash - We are unable to figure out our own code.
WinErr: 01E Timing error - Please wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.
WinErr: 020 Error recording error codes - Additional errors will be lost.
WinErr: 042 Virus error - A virus has been activated in a dos-box. The virus, however, requires Windows. All tasks will automatically be closed and the virus will be activated again.
WinErr: 079 Mouse not found - A mouse driver has not been installed. Please click the left mouse button to continue.
WinErr: 103 Error buffer overflow - Too many errors encountered. Additional errors may not be displayed or recorded.
WinErr: 678 This will end your Windows session. Do you want to play another game?
WinErr: 683 Time out error - Operator fell asleep while waiting for the system to complete boot procedure.
WinErr: 625 Working Error - The system has been working perfectly for the past ten minutes
WinErr: 902 Screen Error - The system is working perfectly, I'm not lying, your monitor is wrong
WinErr: 72a Crucial Halt - Hang on, WHAT was that?
WinErr: 72b Memory Error - What? Tell me again.
WinErr: 39c Disk Error in drive a: - Although your disk is in perfect condition (I just formatted it), I don't like it any more
WinErr: 983 Hard Disk Error - The files on the hard disk were neatly arranged and fully optimised, so I had to mess them up and put a couple of hundred
WinErr: 294 BlackMail Error - $500 to Gates or your computer gets screwed
Winerr: 294b BlackMail Error - $500 to Gates or I'll show your wife the JPG's you just downloaded
vroom vroom
360 degrees of Karma
there are some rules we would want to stick to at minimum
1. Software can not harm a user or through any inaction allow a user to come to harm
2. Software must obey orders give by said user unless it would conflict with first law
3. Software must preserve itself and OS unless conflicting with first or second law
Adapted from the Genius A.Asimov
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
You've been a software develope for 15 years and this concept of severity/priority is news to you? Have you read any IEEE or Capability Maturity Model? There is a book called 'After the Gold Rush', from Microsoft Press. (I know it's microsoft, but it's still a good book). Read it. IT will point you towards many good resources.
At my company, we categorize bugs several different ways. This is all from an IEEE standard, but I don't know which one.
The SEVERITY of the bug is entered when it is discovered. It is one of:
1 - Urgent, causes crash
2 - High - no workaround
3 - medium - workaround available
4 - low - inconvenience.
Other information, such as the steps to reproduce, who discovered it, , a unique ID, and date and version discovered are also recorded. Most important is the TYPE of bug, which is one of:
Code Problem
Configuration Problem
Data Problem
Design ISsue
Enhancement
UI Problem
Documentation Issue
Bugs are assigned to a developer to be fixed. If they are easily fixed, then they are immediately fixed. The unique ID is used in the CVS checkin for the changed files. If the bug is NOT easily fixed, then the developer gives a level of effort, so we can determine the 'cost' of fixing the bug.
Bugs are then assigned a PRIORITY in a 'Configuration Control Board' (CCB) meeting with me (the project manager), several developers, documentation writers, and/or our end users/customers/testers. This can be a small, informal meeting, or a large process-driven meeting. I prefere them small. The PRIORITY in one of:
1 - Urgent, resolve immediately
2 - High, resolve ASAP
3 - Medium, resolve pre-release
4 - Low, desired, but not urgent
5 - on hold, fix in future release.
Our customer has deemed that all severity 1 bugs are automatically priority 1, and all severity 2 are pri 2.
Severity 3 and below are given priorities based on the cost to fix, but if we have too many severity 3's in one 'use case', they collectively become a pri 2.
It's not nearly as much process as it seems, and it really streamlines our development.
We use a tool called TestTrack to track all this, but I would prefer to move towards Bugzilla, as my company has recently jumped on the open source bandwagon.
another comment I should have included in my other post...
As a developer, my relationship with our testing department has changed over the years...
Originally, I thought the purpose of testing was to prove there were no bugs in the system.
They ALWAYS discover bugs. I began to think that the purpose of testing was to discover ALL the bugs, and it was the engineer's job to fix them.
They NEVER discover ALL the bugs. I now think that the purpose of testing is statistical... How many bugs are they finding, and what severity are they? This speaks to the quality of the system design and the quality of the engineers working on the system. If there are few bugs found and fixed, you can be confident you have a good system going out. If there are a lot of bugs found and fixed, I would worry that there are a lot more left undiscovered.
It is a common practice to ship with known bugs, but we NEVER ship with a pri/sev 1 or 2, unless a political deadline forces it.
Sounds to me like the company whose product you are using found more bugs than they could reasonably fix in the time they allocated to this phase of their development cycle, and now they are being forced, for political reasons, to ship with those bugs. That would be a red flag to me that there will be other, undiscovered, severe bugs in their software.
We classify bugs on two axes: severity and priority. This is actually a variation on how MS classifies their bugs internally, and we find that it's great for answering the eternal developer questions of "how bad is the bug?", and "which one should I fix first?"
Severity has to do with how badly the bug affects users:
sev 1: crashing bug, or data corruption
sev 2: feature broken, no workaround
sev 3: feature incomplete, or broken w/ workaround.
sev 4: cosmetic or UI flaw
Priority has to do with how important fixing the bug is to shipping the product. There are no names for the priority levels, but in conjunction with severity levels you can make determinations on what to fix, what to cut, and in what order.
Using this system, a sev1/pri1 bug is clearly the first bug I'd fix. A sev1/pri1 bug gets fixed before a sev2/pri1, and very rarely, a sev2/pri1 bug will get fixed before a sev1/pri2. These last two are the corner cases: sev2/pri1 is typically a very ugly sev2 bug, and a common reason for marking a bug with this classification is to fix a beta or demo issue. A sev1/pri2 bug is also rare - it means that the product crashes or corrupts data after a very obscure repro case.
I've been using this system for years, and I have yet to find a clearer method.
Invisible Agent
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
Get your company to pick a book on QA/Functional Testing. A good practical one that spends a lot of time discussiong bug reporting and problem tracking is: Kaner, Falk, Nguyen, Testing Computer Software, 2nd ed, 1993, Thomson Computer Press. Widely available, from your favorite tech. book store. Another, less practical, more eggheady book is: Beizer, Black-Box Testing, 1995, John Wiley & Sons. It's important to have a well-documented bug classification and tracking system, that everyone involved in the project, especially the non-techie (read marketing and management) types can understand.